App VM Graphics Performance

[laser-brain]

Hello everybody,

I wanted to create a dedicated App VM for some light gaming. I installed Steam and tried some games, but everything I tried runs awfully slow. I’m using a Lenovo Laptop with Intel integrated graphics (Intel HD 4600) but which has also a NVIDIA dedicated graphics Chip (NVIDIA Quadro K1100M).
When running the games on my parallel Windows installation, everything runs relatively smooth. I’ve read that NVIDIA and Qubes don’t work well together and since I don’t really need the additional processing for my games I’d not be sad if I had to disable the chip altogether somehof if that’s possible.

I’ve tried to configure the App VM to have only access to the Intel Chip, but that leads to a system crash when starting it.

My questions are the following: Do I need to let the App VM access the graphics chip at all? Or should that be managed by dom0? If so, why is the performance so bad?
If not, how can I configure the App VM without it crashing?

Additional side question, not related to the topic above. Since one of the latest updates, OS Notifications no longer work (VM starting, shutdown, etc.) and when testing the Notification configuration, the system freezes for about half a minute and displays an error in the config window. Does anybody have experience with this kind of behavior?

Thanks for your time

[Jarrah]

Being VM based, Qubes does not work particularly well with 3D graphics.
Everything in an AppVM is done in software and won’t even touch your
card before being passed to Dom0. The result of this is exceptionally
slow 3D gaming.

There has been some work on GPU pass-through, but it’s neither simple
nor stable.

r/Qubes - GPU passthrough How-To

Google Groups

Google Groups

Qubes is probably running on the Intel GPU by default, which would
explain the system crashing when it is passed through to a VM.

[fsflover]

List of programs that work with Qubes

If you really must use it, GPU passthrough has been achieved on Linux by some users and on Windows by others, but compromises your security. However, this might be worth it depending on your threat model. If I were you, I’d stick all 3D applications on a GPU-equipped offline machine and run Qubes somewhere else, having it handle all other tasks (including downloading, say, assets for Blender). I’d ferry information to and from the PCs using USB (or SSH if you can secure that). (Note I am not an…