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by axonic 3523 days ago
With a second GPU you can get near bare metal performance by using PCI passthrough [1] on UEFI systems. The VM gets exclusive ownership of one adapter essentially. I am currently running Arch for a host, Photoshop via Wine and in Win VM. In the VM it runs far better, just like a native Windows dual boot. I use various Windows and Mac VMs and I routinely game on one monitor while my spouse plays games on the other, runs great. We've joked that Windows 10 runs better in Linux and is easier to manage.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...

edit: Less overhead required for quick usage but no super cow powers, thats why I bother loading via Wine also sometimes. I know someone was wondering...

Also, my Wacom works flawlessly across all OS and seamlessly transitions in a QT5 virtmanager session from Plasma to Windows. ymmv, consult docs for configuration options. I've seen people saying you cant do this, bs.

1 comments

This sounds very attractive. Do you have to have a specific gpu chipset for OS X if you do the pci pass through? Would you consider listing your hardware?
Specs and more, but with added storage, cooling, power, and a second gpu now:

http://hwbot.org/submission/2365111_guiltypixel_cpu_frequenc...

Thank you. The specs list shows one GeForce gtx 660 ti. Do you have two of these?
One 660 and one 260 :)