Virtual Machine for Intel HD passthrough (host is NVidia)

[MartinHowe]

OK, final remarks, now that it's all set up. The machine now has an i7-4790K CPU (4GHz base speed, quad core with H/T), with overclocking turned off and the fan setting to turbo (which makes it do what it should do in standard; not often ASUS get stuff wrong, but nobody's perfect). RAM 16GB, GPU GT-1030 2GB (motherboard GPU disabled), HDD: 1TB SSD.

The machine is now so fast that Pinta (Paint.Net clone for Linux) runs at a decent speed, despite there being no equivalent to ngen, that I don't really need Paint.Net in a VM any more; so the only reason I have to run Windows is UDB; please Satan somebody make a better Windows Forms for mono The city sandbox runs fine as does the first part of Elementalism, though I have yet to dive into the latter fully. This is fast enough that not only is UDB fine, I can even play Planisphere 2 in the VM Albeit at about the same speed as my roughly contemporary i3 machine

It helps that VMWare Workstation Player is free for personal use and is a lot more polished than VirtualBox, particularly as regards virtualisation of the NVidia GPU.

[Rachael]

Unfortunately, yes, it is really sad that a commercial project is so much better than its GPL-licensed counterpart in this case, but it is. VirtualBox really needs a whole lot of love and its parent company being one of the worst that the computing industry has to offer does not help things at all. Still though - it is not the only free virtual machine software available in Linux, and when it really comes down to it. QEMU is miles better both in terms of features and speed - but unfortunately it has abysmal shortcomings in the user-friendliness department. A GUI frontend (virt-manager) does help but it does not fix all of QEMU's unfortunate usability issues.