[robeastham]

On linux you could try QEMU/KVM with GPU passthrough - install virtmanager for GUI. Easy with a desktop, difficult to do, but possible on Optimus laptops with - so you need the right kind of integrated and dedicated GPU there - see this guide https://gist.github.com/Misairu-G/616f7b2756c488148b7309addc.... Easy, but expensive route for a laptop, on a more modern laptop, would be to attach a eGPU enclosure via thunderbolt and share/passthrough that to your VM.

If you are considering doing your VM's on a server then it's worth a look at Unraid too - it uses QEMU/KVM under the hood but has some other advantages too.

Edit: you are likely to lose a little GPU 2-3% due to vm overhead, but GPU passthrough is as close to native as you are going to get. I've happily run a high end VR headset via a Windows VM running on Unraid in the past.

[pmalynin]

I had a similar setup about a year back.

Running a Ubuntu Host with KVM, passing through an NVIDIA 970 to a Windows host. Yea...the GPU performance was fast, but everything else was so slow compared to running native. I think my biggest issue was with disk R/W, especially when memory pressure went up from the VM the system bogged down to a halt. After that, my biggest problems were with the fact that after the Windows host turned off, the GPU was stuck in the weird state where you can't reset it ( I know its a feature™ from Nvidia) and the Keyboard / Mouse would flake since I would attach the whole USB root to the VM as well.

In the end just decided to install back Windows and not have to deal with it.

[dijit]

QEMU recently got multi-threaded I/O. It used to be single threaded and that caused a lot of performance issues.

[AstralStorm]

By recently do you mean 2 to 3 years ago with a simple toggle?

Say hello to distributions not providing latest releases.