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Comment by jcastro | Hacker News Reader

Works if the developer enables it.

For example: Halo Infinite works fine, but Destiny and Call of Duty don't.

Yep. DRM’d online stuff and VR mainstays (Beat Saber, primarily) are the two sets of games that are keeping me tethered to Windows at the moment. VR games can be played via a Windows VM with GPU passthrough but for DRM’d online games you don’t really have any other option, at least if you don’t want to get banned.

I also run a Windows VM for gaming. One thing to note is that some games have (robust!) VM detection checks on launch, so you can’t even run them in the first place. Valorant is one example.

> I also run a Windows VM for gaming

What do you use for the VM? Last time I checked, I couldn't find any free/FOSS VM tooling that allows me to do GPU pass-through on a Linux Host to Windows Guest.

It seems like you haven't looked into it much since it's was feasible for last 7-8 years..

Linux hosts had GPU passthrough working well before commercial software had such options. Nowadays it's just work out-of-box with Virt-Manager that just run QEMU under KVM.

It's been working for years for 99.9% of games excluding some invasive anti-cheats that ban you for VMs, but there literally only a few games that have issue with virtualization.

I use Proxmox and GPU passthrough works just fine (via QEMU). Note that Nvidia GPUs have less issues with passthrough, at least last I checked. See this guide: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/PCI_Passthrough

But if you’re running a standard distro, there are guides for most them.

* Arch guide (excellent resource, applicable to all distros): https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

* Ubuntu: https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/gpu-virtualization-with-qemu-...

* Gentoo: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GPU_passthrough_with_libvirt_qe...

You can also find countless blog posts and videos on setting up GPU passthrough.

One excellent resource for gaming use-cases in particular is this subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/

Last thing to note is that your motherboard can make the process easier if it has good IOMMU support. Basically, you want a MB that puts your PCI slot in a separate IOMMU group. You can find examples by searching for “(MB name) IOMMU groups”.

Beat Saber does work on Linux if you can deal with VR on Linux’s quirks.

Doing so requires a SteamVR headset, though. I’m using a Quest 2 which only works well with Windows.

Up to date compelling SteamVR options are starting to appear however so I might see if I can move over to one of those in the next year or two.

I haven't tried the quest link thing in years, and last I did it dropped FPS a lot vs. using SteamVR. Has that improved?

Not sure either but people with Indexes, Vives, etc seem to be competitive on the Beat Saber leaderboards so any loss can’t be too bad.

* depending on the anti-cheat or DRM

This is true for at least EAC/EasyAntiCheat. This covers a lot, sure, but not everything!

Battleye has integrations with Proton as well, but as with EAC, it's opt in by the developer, and not every dev enables it.

Sure - leads more to my point of... check the games you care about for support. I didn't really want to start itemizing these things.

Most AC used in the competitive Counter-Strike community isn't supported, for example. Only first-party VAC.

It depends on both. Anti-cheat used by Destiny 2 is supported, but Bungie needs to allow it first.

Indeed. I meant to imply both if I managed otherwise. This is just a casual warning - Linux gaming is great [as much as the industry allows]

I didn't really want to start itemizing things. Most competitive Counter-Strike anti-cheat isn't supported.

I've had some luck with the Windows VM approach instead. One may have to disable quite a lot (ie: Hyper-V enhancements) to truly trick them.

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