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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!