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I'm a bit of a newbie in the linux community, and especially in virtualization. I discarded Windows a while back and moved to linux, mainly because my university uses Ubuntu on their computers, and it's good practice. I hadn't done this earlier because I'm a heavy gamer.

Wine and steam have done enough so far, but now that Fallout 4 came out, I'm stuck for the first time.

If I can't play it in linux, and don't want to dual boot to windows every time I want to play, I have to make a virtual Windows guest, I figured. VirtualBox didn't work; W7 installed fine, the direct3d guest addition installed fine, I was able to get poor 3d results from pcmark benchmark, but at least it worked. The game didn't open anyway. Let's for now just go with the idea that I did everything correctly and I simply can't play the game with virtualbox.

So on to Xen. VGA passthrough sounded promising, getting real performance and all, and so I followed a tutorial to setup everything: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=112013

Everything went fine (in the end): I got the W7 guest running, but alas, my GPU (GTX 780 ti) didn't support VGA passthrough, so I had to stop there.

My question is, before I go running for an expensive AMD gpu with VGA passthrough, should I expect to get better results by virtualizing with Xen, as opposed to virtualbox? Is it more likely that I will get the game running with Xen?

I'm not expecting definite answers; I doubt any of you have tested this (and without a VGA passthrough compliant GPU, I cannot myself). I'm not asking this question from the "can I play Fallout 4" standpoint - as to make it a bit more constructive, I want to know if VGA passthrough or something else in Xen makes a world of difference when trying to get a game running that didn't run in VBox.

My specs when testing Xen:

Motherboard: ASUS Z97-A
CPU: Intel Core i7-4790k
GPU1 (for host): CPU-integrated
GPU2 (for guest): GeForce GTX 780 Ti
System: Linux Mint 17.2 with kernel 4.3-wily

VirtualBox was tested in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

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Stop using Xen as your hypervisor, like everyone else did years ago, and switch to KVM.

The NVIDIA card can be passed through perfectly well to a virtual machine, but the driver inhibits this if it detects you are using a VM, as they want you to buy the far more expensive Quadro cards for this sort of thing.

With KVM, you can tell it to not expose the virtual machine MSRs to the guest by adding kvm=off to the -cpu command line option, as well as disabling the Hyper-V enlightenments that KVM implements. This allows the NVIDIA driver to load, since it can no longer detect that it is in a virtual machine.

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  • I'll definitely try this. Thanks for the advice. I'll come back as I've tested this.
    – Olavi Mustanoja
    Commented Nov 13, 2015 at 6:32
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    @OlaviMustanoja so did it work?
    – ufotds
    Commented Dec 19, 2017 at 20:38

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