Gaming in VM? Performance hit?

[jamescecorn]

What is the state of gaming inside of a VM? Is it even doable (my only experience is with servers) how much overhead is used in a typical gaming rig for setting up the VM host?

Why you ask? I back up my computer regularly; and have restore points, etc., etc. But, when the hardware goes (my motherboard popped its USB3 bus) and it's no longer in production/available, I'm left with reinstalling windows from scratch, tracking down all the drivers, and reinstalling all my applications, and reconfiguring everything with a clean install. Pretty much a loss of a weekend.

Whereas, if I ran a virtualization I could just reinstall the OS, VMware, move my image over to the new drive, and I'm up and running again.

So...doable on a gaming rig? Just curious before I contemplate trailblazing a path on my own.

 

[USAFRet]

Generally, a bad idea.
Especially if you're talking about AAA games.

 

[kanewolf]

Virtualization relies on abstracting hardware. That abstraction layer slows things down significantly. You can assign a GPU to a VM with most hypervisors. You can't share most GPUs between multiple VMs.

 

[jamescecorn]

Generally, a bad idea.
Especially if you're talking about AAA games.

why is that?

 

[USAFRet]

Generally, a bad idea.
Especially if you're talking about AAA games.

why is that?

Because you're abstracting most of the hardware.
Games are written to take advantage of the native hardware. A VM is a layer removed from that.