I wish virtualization was a bit less awkward for GPU-intensive stuff.
A VM with a stripped-bare Windows 10 install is likely to be more compatible with weird anti-cheat and DRM than anything Wine-based. Unless they intentionally add sniffing for it.
But VM with a GPU is a nightmare: for nVidia cards at least, you need two cards (one for the Linux desktop and one to feed into the VM), and there's a lot of explicit feature-limitation gotchas beyond that to market-segment people into buying Quadro cards instead.
I'm not opposed to the concept of having a Windows install (especially if it's something like a VM that you can readily manage and keep in a known state) but dual-booting is annoying-- gaming isn't spontaneous anymore.
TBH, I wonder if eventually you'll see a Microsoft product specifically sold as "Windows Runtime for Virtual Machines" -- better to sell a cut-down version with just enough bits to support popular games for $50 than to lose the sale entirely.
Intel's GVT-g, the equivalent feature on Intel GPUs, is not supported yet on the latest generations, last I checked. Plus Intel GPUs are quite underpowered and not really suitable for high-performance GPU computing and gaming and whatnot.
AMD GPUs are restricted (through VBIOS according to what I've heard) to prevent SR-IOV caps from being enabled. So you need to buy an actual enterprise GPU for that. Also… if you buy an enterprise GPU for this SR-IOV functionality and it's relatively new, good luck finding the drivers (and the card itself).
Anyway, my point is that I can't "just" buy a GPU from some manufacturer that doesn't restrict my usage of it, since a high-performance GPU with that ownership tag attached does not exist.
> A VM with a stripped-bare Windows 10 install is likely to be more compatible with weird anti-cheat and DRM than anything Wine-based. Unless they intentionally add sniffing for it.
Performance under Wine would be far better than virtualizing the entire OS, and most anti-cheat systems do prevent playing in a VM as their virtual device drivers are a ripe target for abuse.
Performance might be better, but compatibility is likely to be worse.
In that regard, I'm worried that emulation-based compatibility is much more likely to be an ad-hoc crowd-sourced thing-- how many titles work fine for the first 1-5-10-15 hours, then you hit that one time it uses an unsupported API call? If I rely on some crowd-sourced database that says "platinum compatibility", what's my recourse then?
I guess I'm picturing my experience with FF7 on Windows back in the early 2000s, where it played fine until the middle of the 2nd or 3rd disc and then had a showstopping crash; soured my experience on it for years until I got the late-2010s rerelease which could make it to completion.
A VM with a stripped-bare Windows 10 install is likely to be more compatible with weird anti-cheat and DRM than anything Wine-based. Unless they intentionally add sniffing for it.
But VM with a GPU is a nightmare: for nVidia cards at least, you need two cards (one for the Linux desktop and one to feed into the VM), and there's a lot of explicit feature-limitation gotchas beyond that to market-segment people into buying Quadro cards instead.
I'm not opposed to the concept of having a Windows install (especially if it's something like a VM that you can readily manage and keep in a known state) but dual-booting is annoying-- gaming isn't spontaneous anymore.
TBH, I wonder if eventually you'll see a Microsoft product specifically sold as "Windows Runtime for Virtual Machines" -- better to sell a cut-down version with just enough bits to support popular games for $50 than to lose the sale entirely.