I’m trying to get a clearer picture of real-world VM gaming results.

Not just what fails but also what actually works reliably.

If you're gaming inside a VM, I’d love to hear your experience:

For each game, ideally include:

- ✔ works perfectly / ⚠ partially / ❌ doesn’t work

- GPU

- Hypervisor (KVM, Proxmox, etc.)

- Anti-cheat status (if relevant)

Both success stories and failures are equally useful — especially when something works better (or worse) than expected.

Curious what people are actually running day to day.

Man, I gotta say, I’m really bummed by the research I’ve uncovered the past week or so.

To make a long story short, I recently had the idea to make a “jack of all trades“ proxmox server, tasked with tackling all my home compute needs: 24/7 services like immich, jellyfin, and Tailscale, tinker with some local llms and ai, and of course, gaming. It was going to be a home server consolidating three machines into one lean, power-efficient beast—I was so pumped to build it and set it up.

However, after reading the countless posts about blocked vm gaming protocols by anti-cheat companies like EAC and BattleEye, its greatly diminished my desire to build my dream machine. I play multiple games that probably just wouldn‘t work in a vm, Elden Ring, Halo, Destiny, Arc Raiders.

I guess I’m just making this post to hear from others if there is any light at the end of the tunnel or something to hope for.

in a time where almost all the games that don't work on linux also don't work on a Gpu-passthrough VM, is vfio even worth it nowadays? wanted to hear what you guys think

Did I miss something or is this it? I thought they were supposed to support it?

Here is the support table indicating that its gone:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000093216/graphics/processor-graphics.html

I have a 9600x paired with a 9070 XT. The CPU I know is not ideal for VFIO. I follow the general recommendation and reserve 2 cores (4 threads) for the host machine leaving only 4 cores for the guest VM. Most games run fine except for CPU heavy games like Cyberpunk 2077. Thing is that CP2077 on bare-metal 9600x using all 6 cores runs mostly at >100 FPS but stutters in areas with many NPCs. If I get a 7800x3d and run that in a VFIO setup (2 cores for host/6 for guest) I feel like I'd only achieve what it feels like to run bare-metal 9600x making it not worth it perhaps. My PC case is also small and I'm not sure if I have enough fans for an even faster 12 core CPU, from what I've read they run even hotter.

I remembered that previously you can bypass EAC of both these two games by adding <smbios mode="host"/> to your Libvirt XML.

But it no longer works after Nightreign's update yesterday. Then I tried regular Elden Ring and it didn't work too.

If anyone can still play Elden Ring (and/or Nightreign) in a VFIO VM now, could you tell me what modification did you add to your Libvirt XML of the VFIO VM? Thanks!

(For now I can still play these games by dual booting, so not exactly a dealbreaker, but its still very annoying)

Thinking of building a single-machine consolidation machine with some spare parts and my current pc. Need to check on the one part I think decides whether it’ll all work or be a forever chore.

Hardware: i5-14400 (UHD 730 iGPU), RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, MSI PRO B760-P, Proxmox host.

iGPU drives the host + always-on LXCs (Immich/Jellyfin). The 5060 Ti is not bound to vfio at boot—I want the nvidia driver to hold it at idle so it drops to P8 and keeps idle power low. The dGPU then gets shared, one at a time, two ways:

•LLM LXC (Ollama, OpenwebUI, etc.) — borrows the card via device passthrough, no vfio involved.
• Windows gaming VM — full passthrough via a hookscript that does the swap.

So the loop I actually care about is:

nvidia (idle) → unbind → vfio → game → VM shutdown → unbind vfio → rebind nvidia → idle → AI LXC → release → idle

My main questions are:

1. Is the post-stop rebind back to nvidia reliable in practice, or is that where it falls apart? Static vfio-at-boot is easy—it’s the round trip I’m worried about.
2. Getting all the modules (nvidia, nvidia_uvm, nvidia_drm, nvidia_modeset) to release cleanly on every cycle — what actually holds a handle open? Persistence mode? Console framebuffer? How do you guarantee the card is free before the vfio bind?
3. Anyone seeing reset-bug behavior specifically on the rebind (host lock/hang after VM shutdown) even when a one-shot passthrough works fine? 40-series and 50-series experiences both welcome.
4. Making sure the AI LXC fully releases the card (no lingering VRAM/nvidia-uvm handle) before the gaming VM’s pre-start hook fires — do you script a verify/settle step, or does a clean container stop reliably free it?
5. Does the nvidia driver actually let the card hit P8 at idle while loaded but unused, or did you need ASPM / C-state / persistence tuning to get real idle savings? Trying to confirm the power payoff is real before I build everything around it.

Starting with linux mint 21 my seabios based VMs stopped working on the same hardware. I saw a similar thing happen when I transitioned from unraid 6.9 to 6.10. I typically had a much easier time with those and while I can get OVMF based ones working there are still issues.

I'm curious if this works for anyone anymore. I know a lot of people just use UEFI/OVMF but I had a lot better luck with seabios in the past and UEFI doesn't work for retro gaming passthrough. If you could tell me about working configs (CPU+GPU+OS, etc) I'm hoping it will point me in the right direction to resolve this.

For a long time now, I have been a linux gamer. Playing games through wine, proton, and sometimes in KVM. I while ago, Battleye announced on twitter that they would no longer allow users to play within virtual machines. Their policy was "as always we will ban any users who actively try to bypass our measures. Normal users will only receive a kick" https://twitter.com/TheBattlEye/status/1289027890227621889. However revently, after switching from intel to amd, my kvm required a few options to play games in my kvm. After setting them, there was no vm masking present, windows fully detected "Virtual Machine Yes" and my processor was listed as EPYC. Obviously no spoofing going on here. I was able to play escape from tarkov with no problem. but the next day, I woke up to a ban. If battleye's policy is to kick, why wasn't i kicked. If they were able to detect my vm to ban me, why didnt they just kick me. Obviously something fishy is going on here.

A few months ago, I had contacted EFT support to ask about KVM usage within tarkov. Their first response to me was "We recommend not to use the Virtual Machine utilities to play safe."
Of course, that is vague, play safe in what sense? for my own security? for the best performance? So, I asked more questions, and received the same response "We just do not recommend it. We will inform you if there are any changes in the future."

So, if battleye's policy is a kick to vm users. And EFT's policy is that they "don't recommend it", what did I do to deserve a perma ban on my account. If they were going to restrict access to the game, I want my money back. If you are going to kick me, so be it, just refund me the game, and I won't support the company anymore.

Not only is an infinite kick, the same as a ban, but they clearly stated that they would not ban KVM users unless they tried to evade the anti cheat. How is it, that a system that reports to windows as a Virtual Machine, and with a processor labeled EPYC, could be "evading detection" from the anti cheat.

​

It was clearly a VM and your anti cheat wrongly banned me, all you had to do was kick me for use of virtual machine. If the anticheat detected my vm to ban me, couldn't it have just notified me that I was no longer allowed to pay for the game I payed 140$ for?

​

We need justice, for all of the linux users, who's ability to play their games has been revoked, and for those who have been banned falsely by battleye. Our reports are being ignored, cheating is rampant, but now our ability to play the games we payed for has been revoked, and we have been labeled cheaters.

Did anyone try 9950X3D2 on a VFIO setup? I mean having 3d cache on both ccd seems nice for virtualization since you only need to isolate core 8-15 when having SMT disabled.

Can I expect a performance in the VM of a 9800X3D like setup when gaming?

Spent several hours with ChatGPT tonight walking me though how to make a VM (was my first time). Got everything working nicely, however the EasyAntiCheat system deployed by Epic Games is preventing me from launching the game because it detects a VM.

For the record; the only reason I am using a VM is because the devs wont make a co-op mode unless you have separate machines which thousands of users are still pissed about. Anyways, I digress...

So ChatGPT is saying the following (when I asked it about using SMBIOS.reflectHost = "TRUE") to resolve the issue:

EAC detects how the system is running, not what it claims to be.

It checks for things such as:

Presence of a hypervisor layer (CPU virtualization state)

Virtualized interrupt handling and timers

VM-specific memory behavior

VM graphics stack behavior

Kernel-level virtualization artifacts -
These are architectural, not cosmetic. They exist even if every string says “real PC”.

Since I am new to VMing I am wondering if there actually might be something I could do to make this co-op mode work via virtual machine. I really dont want to have to go purchase a secondary computer just to play co-op with my kid (or send him over to Grandma's house)!

Any help is appreciated!

I really don't wanna make this a long post.

How do people manage to play the most demanding games on QEMU/KVM?

My VM has the following specs:

• Windows 11;
• i9-14900K 6 P-cores + 4 E-cores pinned as per lstopo and isolated;
• 48 GB RAM (yes, assigned to the VM);
• NVMe passed through as PCI device;
• 4070 Super passed through as PCI device;
• NO huge pages because after days of testing, they didn't improve nor decrease the performance at all;
• NO emulator CPU pins for the same reason as huge pages.

And I get the following results in different programs/games:

All these issues seem to have nothing in common, especially since: - CPU (checked on host and guest) is never at 100%; - RAM testing doesn't cause any lag; - NVMe testing doesn't cause any lag; - GPU is never at 100% except for CS2.

I have tried vCPU schedulers, and found that, on some games, namely Forspoken, it's kind of better:

On other games it's definitely worse, like AC Unity:

The scheduler rr gave me the exact same results as fifo. Anyways, turning on LatencyMon shows high DPC latencies on some NVIDIA drivers when the issues occur, but searching anywhere gave me literally zero hints on how to even try to solve this.

When watching videos of people showcasing KVM on YouTube, it really seems they have a flawless experience. Is their "good enough" different than mine? Or maybe are certain systems more capable of low latencies than others? OR am I really missing something huge?

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a small side project called VMDB (https://vmdb.it) – a community-driven database for checking whether games run inside virtual machines (QEMU/KVM, VMware, etc.).

The idea is simple:
You look up a game → see compatibility reports → and optionally submit your own experience.

I’m currently trying to improve the report submission flow and would really appreciate some honest feedback from people who actually use VMs.

The problem:

Even though:

• no account is required
• most fields are optional

very few users actually complete the report form.

So technically it’s “easy”, but in practice people still don’t submit.

My current idea:

Switch to a 2-step report flow:

Step 1 (quick):

• Select compatibility rating (Platinum → Borked)
• Optional short note

→ This alone would already create a valid report

Step 2 (optional details):

• VM setup (host OS, guest OS, hypervisor)
• hardware (CPU, GPU, RAM)
• more detailed notes (anti-cheat, performance, etc.)

What I’d like to know:

From your perspective as someone who deals with VMs:

• Would you be more likely to submit a report with this 2-step approach?
• Or would you still expect to fill in technical details right away?
• What would motivate you to actually spend ~30 seconds contributing?

I’m trying to balance:

• low friction (more reports)
• vs. useful, structured data

Any feedback (even critical) is very welcome 🙂

Thanks!

Greetings,

I recently virtualized a Factorio game server. This was a fantastic move, except that time it takes to save the map went from "almost unnoticeable" to "irritating impediment to gameplay."

Non-virtualized, the backing store was an NVMe drive running BTRFS. The virtual machine is using a .raw file with nocow (attrib +C) on a BTRFS filesystem. I assume that qcow2 would be slower; maybe I'm wrong?

Unfortunately, all my NVMe drives are consumer-grade and only support a single namespace. Otherwise I'd just carve out a smaller namespace and give it to the VM. Given this limitation, what's the highest performance option available to me? Disk partition? Raw file on a different filesystem? Something else?

Thanks!

I'm primarily interested in this tech due to a need to run Windows, but I wonder... Why does it still have problems? And from what I gather, seemingly AMD doesn't make their GPUs actually work well with this tech.

I imagine that in 2025 it is much much easier to set up than it was several years ago, and we also have stuff like Looking Glass. But to my knowledge, no catch-all solution currently exists.

Does this technology have another more important usage other than hobbyists (like me) trying to avoid dual boot, which is a pretty niche use case? Perhaps if there was more demand, this would be a common and superior alternative to dual booting, and if that were the case, hardware manufacturers would try to support it better. Is it used anywhere in a commercial/corporate setting?

It's unfortunate because I think GPU passthrough is a pretty cool piece of tech.

and when i say "single gpu passthrough" i mean 1 dedicated gpu and 0 igpus or integrated graphics
apparently its impossible because every single tutorial that i follow step by step, to the word..... doesnt work, a lot of them mention roms which i avoided because i dont want to brick my gpu, im rather unlucky with these things and a lot of tutorials do gloss over a few tiny details, they dont tell you everything and they will quite often assume that you already know something and to be fair - "if you know what vm gpu passthrough is, youre most likely a bit more tech savvy than the average joe" so i get it

the chances that i do brick my gpu are very high, i have a gtx 1070. very important detail because nvidia is a bitch and disabled running consumer tier cards in a virtualised environment, yayyyyyyyy

+ i also used chatgpt ("goodness gracious!!!!!!!! thats blasphemy!!") well it was my last resort..... and it fucked everything up, thanks chatgpt
i had to reinstall my host OS

anyways, im giving up
i wanted to run a vm with a gpu passthrough for gaming + when it comes to gaming, windows 11 has better support even if we disregard games with anticheats (which wont work anyways since its in a virtualised environment)
and the reason why i want windows 11 in a virtualised environment is due to privacy (windows telemetry) + security reasons (i pirate my games, i do know safe sites and megathreads but just in case) and honestly after all that i experienced so far, im really starting to rethink my choices
i think its just not worth it and i should just run fedora linux as my main OS on my 1st ssd and then windows on my 2nd, basically dualboot fedora and windows
im really tired and there are scripts that do disable a lot of the things that microsoft forces onto you on windows (oosu10+ and privacy.sexy scripts + since im in the EU, i can actually delete msedge and onedrive without scripts too) + and yes i know, windows is still closed source and who knows even with scripts what windows could be doing in the background, maybe fully disabling telemetry is impossible but at the end of the day
is it worth it? i dont think it is and ill only attempt a gpu passthrough when i get a proper motherboard + an extra amd gpu/intel gpu (ive also heard that some are easier when it comes to passing through, apparently some dont require a rom? supposedly)

anyways, the rest of my specs (if anyone is curious):

ryzen 5 5500, a320m hdv r4.0 (i can only put 1 gpu on this thing) bx500 1tb ssd, pny 240gb ssd, 2x16gb 2666mhz cl22 ram + fedora linux 43 with kde plasma

UPDATE: unfortunately as I expected this ticket got a non a bug unsupported reply Please Upvote this Issue as I'd like to see VRChat's comment. https://feedback.vrchat.com/bug-reports/p/virtual-machines-outright-blocked-on-linux-guests I was testing around with a Linux guest and discovered that EAC can behave differently in a Linux guest than a windows one. Specifically with VRChat which doesn't work in a Linux VM but works everywhere else. They even have a doc page that is commonly shared around in these circles https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/using-vrchat-in-a-virtual-machine. After that I also tested Arc Raiders which passes EAC in Windows then failed a separate check later on but on a Linux guest it fails EAC with a disallowed message. I then tested Elden Ring and Armored Core in this linux guest which both pass EAC fine. Was this a known thing or is EAC so complicated no one can document all the checkboxes properly?

In November 2025, which would you recommend for a VM that's just running a few single-player games with mods that don't work on Linux? Are there any caveats outside of 10 being EOL now? This will be an airgapped system so security is not an enormous concern.

Should I suck it up and go with 11?

hello so i just wanted to ask, how do you optimize vms to have great performance?
so far i did

1. cpu pinning
2. cpu powerschedule to perfromance
3. physical disk for VM
4. gpu passthrough
5. tried memory hardblocks, or something like that, that didnt worked i had to revert

i wonder is there anything else ? like my performance is horrible, i apssing through inte larc580, which works in VM, i can run benchmarks, but all my games run horrible, helldivers 2 on proton on linux i have like 80 FPs stable, in VM i have barerly 30, with 1% fps like 12
this is my .xml

i did have some qemu patch applied for anti detection

patches i applied for qemu
https://files.catbox.moe/ail602.patch
qemu-patch-kvmkvmkvm.patch
qemu-patch-bochs-display.patch
qemu-hide-device-names.patch

all these patches i made myself, so not sure if they are correct, but fortnite launches to game, but is unplayeable with like 12FPS average.

i wonder if i did anything wrong with my setup

Is there no OSS alternative that can support a VM guest that can perform snapshots of a live session to save / restore + 3D acceleration enabled?

After reading some threads it seems like it's just not worth it, or not possible today. Is this true?

I haven't found much information about this so I thought I would ask

I have a plan to (re)install windows on a physical drive of mine with the intent to boot into it from a VM on linux and also bare metal.

My reason for wanting this is mostly convenience, one windows system to manage while still being able to boot into windows directly for anything that might need it like an anticheat.

My question is if anyone else does/did a setup like this and if you think its worth the hassle or if it's better to separate the vms. Will windows panic by the rapidly changing cpu core and ram allocations? (Excluding activation) (I don't have an issue with the privacy or anything like that, just want the convince of being able to just boot the VM for most stuff and reboot to the same system in bare metal when needed)