Background

A couple of years ago I mucked around with something called PCI-E passthrough.
The idea is to let a Virtual Machine (VM) use an physical GPU.
This lets me, who almost exclusively run Linux, run some Windows only games in a Windows VM. I think I was first exposed to this idea through a reddit post on r/linux_gaming, possibly this one:

GPU Passthrough – Or How To Play Any Game At Near Native Performance In A Virtual Machine (xpost /r/pcmasterrace) from linux_gaming

Thing is, that guide was really only a jumping off point into an endless sea of configuration and testing, and eventual success. But it was really only a toy for me, to see if I could.

The secondary GPU was an AMD 4850HD, which was pretty elderly, and I wasn’t going to be able to use it for everything I wanted. After the initial success, I shelved the project.

And then…

A few months ago, Matt came to me with a suggestion that we attempt to follow this procedure:

We both attend the Skynet Wales LAN , and he thought it’d be cool to be able to do all our gaming from a single rig instead of both of us having to take our entire setups.

NO, THIS CANNOT BE

The unRAID solution, on paper, looked like the easiest way to do this, but two things made me disagree
1. I had already set up something similar a while back
2. Why do it the easy way when yo can do it the hard way.

Later on it turned out I made the correct call here for a couple of reasons. I’ll go into why later on.

The next few posts will go through the Hardware we used, the software / VM setup, the various tweaks we’ve applied, and some benchmarking results. Then finally how it performed in a real world event.