playing games on virtual machines

Question

I am looking for a notebook running ubuntu as host OS and via virtual box virtualize multiple environments without loosing performance. I want to try chef/ansible environments, web,mail,dns servers, vulnerable machines, and last but not least, windows for using MS Office, and playing some 3D videogames (all of this as virtual environments). Should I aim for a specific CPU? Does a good GPU matters if I want to play GPU intensive videogames on a virtualized environment?

Solution 1

Yes, find a CPU that supports VT-x, VT-d, and IOMMU if you plan to game under a virtual machine, as these features will improve performance and allow you to forward your graphics processor to the virtual machine, allowing decent graphics and games to function and be playable. You can read about how to do this under Linux, here are a few tutorials. They explain it quite well. You may need a more sophisticated Linux distribution such as Arch, apposed to Ubuntu. It may not have all the packages required.

https://medium.com/@dubistkomisch/gaming-on-arch-linux-and-windows-10-with-vfio-iommu-gpu-passthrough-7c395dde5c2

https://heiko-sieger.info/running-windows-10-on-linux-using-kvm-with-vga-passthrough/

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=212692

https://davidyat.es/2016/09/08/gpu-passthrough/

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/play-games-in-windows-on-linux-pci-passthrough-quick-guide/108981

Solution 2

I don't recommend playing games on a Windows guest system on a virtual machine. I've tried a simulator and it did not work, of course, it probably depends on the game too. If you are looking at a game that requires a quite a bit of CPU (such as a simulator), it probably won't work.

I've got a MacBook Air with an Intel Core i7, it can process up to 2.2GHz, and 3.2 GHz turbo. This wasn't enough to run a simulator on Windows guest. I installed Windows on a separate partition and that made a world of difference. I'd recommend with going for installing Windows on a separate partition. If you do that, you don't need a lot of CPU to play games.

Comments

[JohnnyVegas]

With virtualization - Video adapter makes some difference with applications like visual studio for example - RAM and more than one processor - xeon quad core minimum. I don't know of a laptop that is powerful enough to do what you require, and if there was one it would be more expensive than a decent virtual environment (DELL Power-edge T410 with 2xIntel Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz) and a high end gaming laptop together.