If you don't want to use it (many reasons), virtualizing or dualbooting doesn't really make a difference.

You make it sound as if it is trivial to configure the GPU passthrough.

Also, you'll need two graphics adapters for this.

It's not that hard to setup these days honestly, I think the requirement of having 2 GPUs is a turnoff for a lot of people though.

And I think it's been catching on a lot more now that both Intel offers VT-d standard in most of it's chips. So does AMD with its SVM equivalent.

I like this approach Valve is taking better than resorting to VMs though. I'll probably continue to use my GPU passthrough setup for now but when the game compatibility on this gets better I'll likely switch.

So an intel CPU + discrete GPU fills the requirement?

Also novidia is known to block driver installs from a VM because “you should be using a professional GPU for that” but there are ways to trick the installer.

AMD has no such problems.

Correct, it is way easier to setup with kvm. Would highly recommend AMD cards for this over nVidia.

I'm using VMs but not for gaming, just running Linux guests on Linux host. virgl works pretty well now for that purpose. But what's really missing is SR-IOV. AMD so far didn't want to support it in regular cards.

Setup can still be a bit annoying.

If I imagine the average PC gamer, I don't think they would be able to troubleshoot any problems. Once you get into setting up storage pools (libvirt) or having to edit the libvirt XML file (want to have host native Audio?) and of course installing all those drivers for optimal performance (digging up the correct CD image and mounting it is not trivial either.

Isn't the 2 GPU requirement just for running native graphics concurrently on both systems? You can still use the Linux host remotely over the network.

edit: here's a receipe: https://github.com/joeknock90/Single-GPU-Passthrough

The other issue going down the HVM route is the number of multiplayer platforms e.g. Steam that ban users running inside of a hypervisor[1]. From their perspective it masks the existence of things like memory manipulation tools and other cheating devices.

[1] - https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/9/1355103931983...

My laptop came with Windows pre-loaded on the original SSD. No installation medium obviously, other than the recovery partition. I'm curious if it even loads if I tell Virtualbox to load it from that drive, given that the hardware it presents in a virtualized system is significantly different from the actual laptop hardware.

got any tips for a starting point on that (hardware assisted virtualization)? I'd be super interested.

what host os, guest os, virtualization stack (vmware??), video card combo is working for you?

Cheers.