What games can you play Without GPU passthrough?

I know about the difficulties and security risks with GPU passthrough, and I don’t intend to try and deal with that. I mean, on a relatively stock Qubes install (i.e., without any relevant device modifications), where is the upper limit on what can successfully run? By “successfully,” I mean it can start up and run without crashing and without lagging to the point of more resembling a slideshow than anything else.

Obviously, AAA games are out, and probably anything 3D in general. The following is what I’m envisioning, in roughly increasing order of graphics complexity:

  • Dwarf Fortress
  • Arbitrary DS/Game Boy ROMs
  • Stardew Valley
  • Celeste
  • Factorio

I don’t imagine these would be unplayable without a GPU, but I was wondering if anyone had any relevant experiences they could share.

Simple: just try it.
Performance will be poor, but might be playable. With your fan spinning up like crazy and high cpu load, also high energy consumption.

I haven’t been able to find a game I want to play that runs well without a GPU.

You can install Lutris and run pretty much any game on the CPU, but performance is terrible. Even games that don’t seem GPU intensive don’t run at all, we are talking less than one frame per second.

I haven’t tried the games you mention, maybe you will have a different experience. If they have a native Linux client, there should be some hope you can get it to work.

For me the solutions was to repurpose an older workstation just to run games, I’ve hooked it up with a KVM switch and that works fine.

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I do have some experience at least when it comes to my gaming taste.

It’s not like 3D is completely out. I can successfully play PS1 games via PCSXR full speed. Translating this experience to PC games is something like: games from the late 90s that run fine with WineHQ may run well but those from the 00s will result in a slideshow.

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Ahaha, great!

Battle for Wesnoth runs fine.

What games can you play Without GPU passthrough?
Imagine this not relevant but if solitaire card games interest anyone PySol Fan Club Edition work in debian 11. Does anyone have experience with MAME or other emulators?

MAME works out-of-the-box in the Debian template, you can install gnome-video-arcade if you want a xorg front-end for loading games.

If you want to play old PlayStation games, you can use pcsxr, it also works out-of-the-box.

The only issue I have is that my controller doesn’t work.

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Online chess works fine-ish, but lags a bit.

Heroes of Might & Magic 3 with the HD mod works decently well in direct draw setting

OpenRCT2 runs flawlessly.

Warblade works aswell altough the window is pretty small and I have not figured how to stretch it.

I think many more games from the 90s and early 2000s era should run fine. compatibility without passthrough might have something to do with opengl support im not sure how it works

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Into the breach kinda works… turn based games are quite playable when you can run them because even if slow, that doesn’t affect the gameplay itself.

Here is a list of games that can potentially run on a relatively stock Qubes install:

  • Dwarf Fortress (2D)
  • Arbitrary DS/Game Boy ROMs (2D)
  • Stardew Valley (2D)
  • Celeste (2D)
  • Factorio (may require lower settings due to complexity)

While 3D games are generally not recommended, some less demanding titles may be playable with lower settings.

In addition to gaming, you can also consider enrolling in a graphic designing course to enhance your creative skills and potentially use software that doesn’t require a dedicated GPU. Many popular graphic design applications like Adobe Photoshop and Inkscape run well on integrated graphics. These courses can be found online or at local community colleges and can teach you valuable skills in visual communication, branding, and design principles.

You can play cloud gaming games using Geforce Now or Xcloud (comes with GamePass library) in 720p in a qube without GPU passthrough.

You need to pay for the service for Xcloud, Geforce Now can be used freely but you have to wait every time you start a game.

is irc trolling considered a game? if so that works on qubes :troll:

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I play some high end games on Qubes without many issues at all.

I’ll have to find out what I had done as it was ages ago that I had it working.

But firstly, Have you increased the VRAM for the guest to utilise yet?

without GPU passthrough?

Yes, without GPU passthrough.

I’ll try to find the instructions on how to achieve it with XEN again.

It was a while ago, will have to go through my backups, may take some time
as it was a couple of years ago. Maybe 3 drives and about 700 guests to go
through.

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You can probably figure this out youself, but if you know a keyword in the filename your looking for, you could use something like this in dom0:

qvm-ls | sed 's/\([^ ]*\)[ ].*/qvm-run --pass-io \1 sudo find \/ | grep -i put-keyword-here > \/tmp\/\1.matched-files.output/'

run the lines it outputs to search every file in every qube for a matching string, then just:
cat /tmp/*matched-files.output

(note: I didn’t auto-execute the output lines just in case it would attempt to launch all qubes in parallel :slight_smile:

  • Doom with dsda-doom source port works very fine in software mode. You can play keyboard only, but for mouse you’re gonna need this: Qubes redirect mouse input to VM · GitHub
  • I also had good luck running retro games using mednafen, a CLI-driven retro console emulator. With this, you get thousands of old games at your disposal, working fine with no GPU acceleration!

Runs great:

  • Julius/Augustus
  • DuckStation
  • MelonDS
  • ScummVM
  • OpenRA
  • EasyRPG
  • PPSSPP
  • Planescape EE
  • VCMI

Runs under strain:

  • Colobot
  • random 2d unity games
  • RPGMV games (nwjs)

Doesn’t run:

  • Starsector (java)