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I have a PC with an AMD Athlon II X4 635, 2,9 GHz and 8 GB RAM.

Because of my soon to be new job as an trainee for network administration, I want to know, if I might be able to virtualize windows 10 in debian host

  1. Can I still play games inside windows guest VM?

  2. How is virtualization with graphics would it impact gaming performance or I might not be able to play at all?

Thanks to SeanClt for the edit.

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  • Are you planning on using Debian or Windows as the host? What VM software will you be using? Mar 19, 2016 at 15:54
  • The host should be Debian, so I am forced to use it. VM Software maybe VMware, VirtualBox or similar, i am not really focused on the Software at this point.
    – souichiro
    Mar 19, 2016 at 15:57
  • Don't expect serious 3D gaming unless you managed to do VGA passthrough with KVM (which requires two display cards, one can be builtin though)
    – Tom Yan
    Mar 21, 2016 at 9:05

1 Answer 1

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Any virtual host running on any host no matter what the host operating systemm, hypervisor and hardware is, will have decreased performance in general. Some parts like memory management have good solutions, making the virtual host memomry management close to host machine speed, but other parts might have to go through several loops to do the same as the host machine. Depending on the hypervisor, some aspect might be faster than others.

There might be "gaming" hypervisors out there that specialize in getting performance, but I doubt that you will find any that is able to give you satisfactory frame rates and quality in your gaming experience compared to running the game on the host itself. Of course this depends on the type of game you play and what requirements exist for this game to run at "satisfactory level".

I am especially thinking about graphics and drivers for your graphics card. In a virtualised host, the operating system will not be aware of your physical device, but the graphics driver presented by the hypervisor. Meaning that it might not be able to use all the fancy stuff that your graphic card supports. This is especially true for 3D graphics where frame rate is important.

From experience I can tell you that for games that run and is playable, there are other problems often. Mouse drifting outside of the virtual host window so that the game stops. Sound breaking up.Graphics breaking up because you switched to the host system etc.

I play games on virtualised hosts, but all of them are relatively simple games with low requirements.Any game that require relatively high performance and throughput, I play on the host itself or on a separate machine for the purpose.What I am saying is that it is possible to play games on them, but there are issues, not only graphics but also perceived quality of the gameplay itself.

While answering your post i searched for gaming hypervisors and disovered that you can do something called VGA passthrough. I have no experience with this, but it seems to be a viable solution to get graphics up to speed on a virtualised host.

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  • Thank you so much, the answer itself is giving me a lot of information, where I need to gather more information in general. I will try it out and post the results here in the comments.
    – souichiro
    Mar 22, 2016 at 9:05

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