Well in terms of anticheat, VM’s require immense amounts of knowledge to avoid detection. Ive heard specifically that Rainbow Six: Siege will ban you for playing under VM, as well as Valorant. Dual booting is best to avoid anticheat, but if that doesn’t matter, then a VM with passthrough can be extremely performant.

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It used to be worth it, but Linux can run so many more games now thanks to Proton and other improvements. Most of the games that won’t run on Linux now don’t run due to anticheat, and many anticheat programs don’t like VM/GPU passthru.

So basically I don’t consider it worth it anymore.

Hey op if you do go with passing through your GPU check this out https://looking-glass.io/

These days this is rarely that useful. The most common reason games don’t work on Linux is anticheat, and games with that kind of anticheat tend to try to stop you from running them in a VM too. There are ways around that, but it’s an annoying cat-and-mouse game.

Personally a game that doesn’t run on linux turn me down so much that i don’t want to play it at all. Check https://libregamewiki.org/Main_Page

The way I would handle things is first I would look for a native Linux version, and if that wasn’t available, then I’d try to use Wine / Proton, and if it didn’t work that way either, then I’d look at streaming it through a service like GeForce Now. It would be easiest to have a separate drive with Windows on it but now that Microsoft is turning Windows into ad-filled spyware more than ever before, especially with Windows 11, I’d rather use one of the above options instead.

I’d even be tempted to get a Mac Mini to handle the software that wouldn’t work with one of the above options rather than use Windows.

I wanted to go the VM route about a year ago, but I ended up deciding that it was just too much hassle and have kept my Windows dual boot for the extremely rare occasions that I need to use it.

I started out using the GTX 770 from my previous PC as the secondary graphics card to pass through to the VM - which is a lot easier than doing it with a single graphics card - but given how often I actually need to use Windows, I didn’t feel particularly comfortable with the extra power use.

So I decided I’d have a go at single GPU passthrough - which took me probably about six months of on/off (mostly off, admittedly) tweaking to get to a usable state. The first time I managed to boot Windows from my Linux install, I nearly cried. After a while fiddling with it, I decided that, as technologically awesome as it is, it really wasn’t that much different than running it on bare metal. The straw that broke the camel’s back was my inability to get Windows to gracefully hand the GPU back to Linux, despite the fact that it should have been as simple as reversing the steps to give Windows the GPU in the first place.

i’ve had good success with this but ofc ymmv. it can be hard to get your windows vm performance tweaking right and it can take a buttload of time. if you want best mitigation of anti-cheat risk and best performance then you should continue to dual boot imo.

Thank you all for the helpful answers. I’ve deleted Windows and decided to not even try running it again.

Hello Gentoo Linux full-time!