Basic questions about virtual machines
Basic questions about virtual machines
You're thinking about building a shared system for you and your girlfriend. The specs you mentioned sound solid—7950x, 64GB RAM, 2TB storage, and an RTX 4090. It should work well if you split the resources fairly. Some cores might be reserved for the VM, but it depends on how you configure it. If you're the only user, the full power of the GPU will likely be available. Setting up a VM is manageable and can be automated with good tools.
Well vGPU isn't available at the customer level cards beyond Pascal, so it wouldn't function. Regarding the CPU, for instance, if you allocate 8 threads to a virtual machine, that VM can only utilize 8 threads of processing power, with the remainder going to the host and other VMs.
When you set up a virtual machine, you can specify its number of virtual cores, memory size, and disk capacity. These resources are only active when the VM is running. You cannot divide a consumer GPU between the host and the VM; you need a workstation card that supports vGPU. On a consumer device, you require two GPUs—one for the host and one for the VM ("GPU passthrough"). Setting up a VM is straightforward. Start by creating a new virtual machine, set its hardware attributes, add an ISO disk into its virtual drive, install the operating system as usual. In practice, it functions similarly to a regular computer, so it demands the same maintenance (updates, drivers, etc.). Because the underlying hardware isn’t real outside the GPU (unless you enable passthrough), drivers usually come from the VM’s built-in utilities. Programs inside the VM often perform close to 90% of their speed compared to physical hardware. However, when both host and VM run demanding tasks simultaneously, interactions can become unpredictable. The VM won’t exceed the resources you allocate, but its software still consumes them, and host processes unaware of the VM may try to utilize as many cores as possible—unless you adjust affinity settings. Generally, it’s simpler and more economical to use two genuine machines instead. Plus, you gain a spare system in case one fails.
You won't face any problems getting banned on certain games because of running in a virtual machine. For a similar experience, you can use two units together—either by combining them into one case or by using specialized dual-sided cases that allow two full systems (not just an ATX and MITX board on one side but two ATX boards on either side).