I just came here to post "i9 is the new i7". And i7 is the new i5. I really, really don't appreciate that, it's insulting to my intelligence.
And now I'm the new AMD fan. Oh wait, I'm the old AMD fan returning to the fold after a couple generations in the wilderness. What fun to see Intel playing catch-up with AMD. Though AMD is not Intel's biggest problem, far from it, ARM is.
Before plunging to GPU passtrough, you should test your games with Wine and DXVK. I've been playing No Man's Sky and Fallout 4 with Wine+DXVK in 1440p for a quite a while now, on i7-6700 and GTX1080. Expect some graphic glitch here and there
Speaking of which, I installed Vulkan support on a Debian box a couple days ago and it came up without rebooting or even restarting X. How cool is that? Feeling lucky, I hunted down and installed the Unity Editor. Wow, it works great. Ran through all the tutorials in about 15 minutes, they are pathetic but you get some orientation. Basically, you learn to push the play button and you learn to drag and drop assets onto game objects.
Jumped straight into a demo project and was confused for hours, but eventually broke through to the other side. This is just great, I will double plus unconditionally recommend it. At that point I immediately lost all interest in Windows gaming, why run them when you can make them? To be sure, I haven't got time or energy to make a commercial one, but talk about fun and bang for the buck: $0.00 down and $0.00 a month gets you endless entertainment. Now bringing my kid up to speed on it, who will quickly surpass me. I'll just have to be content being the scripting consultant. I have no problem at all sending $$$ in the general direction of Unity Technology, I just love what they did. Does anybody know about this?
BTW, this seems to be Wine based because of all the dlls, and it also includes Mono as the scripting language, a convincing answer to the question "is Mono really compatible with C#?".
Also ran a bunch of fan-made Linux Unreal engine demos, they are awesome, and Unreal may well be the better engine for the moment. I'm hardly complaining, Unity is way more than enough for me, and Unity Editor is said to be more intuitive. I will be able to weigh in on that myself UDK for Linux lands, which looks imminent.
It's been a couple of years, but last time I checked 3d performance and compatibility with vmplayer was vastly ahead of KVM.
A couple of years ago was exactly when GPU passthrough was under heavy development. Now there are multiple reports of success and I just don't see horror stories. I have no doubt that VMware player was way ahead at the time, I have tremendous respect for their ability to make stuff work, but they also like to wrap it in layers of cruft that you can't avoid. That's a turnoff for me, compared to KVM, which is accessible at every level, including the one I prefer which is simply the command line. I'm perfectly capable of setting up my own disk images, thanks. VMDK is completely irrelevant to me.
Most folks use KVM via virt-manager or similar, I have no data on that. They seem happy, so I am happy for them. I'm happy for you too.:) The world is a better place with VMware in it. At the very least they keep the KVM devs on their toes.
for goodness sake, never record a video without rotating to landscape
Strongly disagree. Shoot video in the orientation that suits the situation, just like stills. Changing the orientation in post processing is trivial.
I think the majority of people would benefit from that sort of advice much more than just "If your memories matter to you that much then get a real camera."
To restate, a mediocre camera, which is the only possible description for even the best phone camera, is perfectly fine for an Eiffel Tower selfie, but pathetic for a wedding, even if you are not the official photographer. You will miss tons of great shots with a phone, never mind the quality.
Some people still care about memories but don't have the time or interest to get serious about photography
Some people think that a Camry is a great car. I avoid discussing cars with them. I also don't disparage people for having no skill or talent for photography, but if somebody styles themselves a photographer, even amateur, that changes things. Let's not have more nonsense about how a phone is as good a camera as a high end DSLR, or even a Rebel.
What linux virtualization solution would you recommend for hosting Win10 + games with gpu virtualization?
I haven't tried it myself yet, but there are multiple reports of success with Ryzen+KVM+GPU+W10, for example this one.
You say its 'good enough' to run AAA games. What sort of performance hit am I really facing?
My impression is, very little. GPU virtualization gives the guest OS direct access to PCI registers, the overhead can get very close to zero. This report from 2014 shows overhead consistently less than 3%, often a lot less, and remarkably, sometimes actually faster in the VM. I'm not sure how that last one works.
The big overhead for VMs tends not to be CPU, but memory consumption, make sure you have enough to make both host and guest comfortable. You should be fine with 16 GB, but more memory is always better, I'm liking how it feels with 32 GB. You will want a separate SSD for Windows, I think, but that's not going to break the bank.
Do some games "just-not-work" What sort of stability loss am i looking at?
Again, I'm not doing it myself right now (I have too many unplayed games already without a bunch more from Windows) but I see multiple reports of success with GTA 5 and I don't see any horror stories. My feeling is, your system as a whole will be more stable than it is now, and the VM+Windows part of it will be exactly as stable as now.
I've got an i7 and a gtx1080, if that's a factor.
Though I am a newly-minted Ryzen fanboy, I love Intel too except for their business practices. VM stability seems exactly the same for Intel and AMD. That is very cool. Number of VM crashes I had over the years on Intel or AMD: exactly zero, and I really thrash those VMs.
What's the situation with multi-monitor support with something like this?
Dunno. I'm waiting for your report. The question you ought to ask is, what's the situation with sharing the GPU between host and guest? Lots of active discussion on it. It's a thing, and multi-monitor passthrough is a thing.
And peripheral pass through? (usb headsets, usb controllers).
KVM has good USB passthrough, but for mouse and audio where performance is not an issue you probably want the virtual devices. There are a whole pile of online resources on it, e.g. here and the community is active. Mostly people seem to be using libvirt and virt-manager. I don't, I just read the man page and run KVM/QEMU from the command line. Do that only if you enjoy that kind of thing.
My expensive 32 gigs of ram would have to be thrown out for DDR 4 in addition of a new motherboard.
You could ebay it now while it's still worth something:) 32 GB of ddr4 can be had for $280 as of today. My crystal ball says there's a significant ddr4 price drop coming soon.
I don't disagree, waiting is a good option. I am eyeing a 16 core Zen 2 Threadripper build with 64 GB, hopefully it can be done for around $2000 some time in 1H/2019. Hardly a budget box, but great value and easy to justify by faster builds. But what to do with 64 lanes of PCI? Let's see, GPU is just 8, I'm not going to do dual or triple. Four lanes per M.2, then I'm up to 12 or 16, now what? A shame to let it go to waste.
You are out there beyond my personal experience. My impression is that it wil but the performance hit is too much for high end gaming.
I bought the 4770 instead of the 4790 because it was cheaper. I regret that choice as it doesn't support I/O pass thru. As a result I am limited to Windows 10/Hyper-V or Virtualbox unless I want to pluck $$$$ for VMWare workstation
Sorry Intel screwed you. Instead of dropping bucks on VMWare, why not change out the 4770 for a Ryzen? A motherboard swap is kind of hard core the first time but its a great skill to learn, and alternatively any decent screwdriver shop can do it in minutes.
I parted ways with Vmware when KVM (and others) started to get really good. Now, I much prefer KVM. I mean, really strongly prefer. Vmware had its day in the sun.
I feel very obtrusive when I whip out the big box with the long lens, and it intimidates people.
And one more thing... what is not intimidating about waving a cell phone in somebody's face? What is candid about that? To be honest, candid is a bit creepy. I also review with the subject after and invite them to delete if there's an issue.
Intimidating with a big camera is a real thing. It tends to evaporate a few shots in, assuming decent people skills. Otherwise, it's a situation I don't want to be in and will more than happily disengage from. Usually, camera shyness flips to exactly the opposite after seeing the first review image.
The only way it's even useful at all for candids is by utilizing the considerable telephoto capability.
So you can't shoot from the hip? After a couple hundred thousand DSLR shots it became second nature for me. It's far from the only option. Always keeping in mind proper respect for the subject of source.
Which one you personally chose is completely irrelevant...
Rubbish. This is true of pretty much anybody carrying a DSLR. You use the DSLR because it is a beast. Same reason you drive a race car on the track, not a Camry.
Not to mention, with recent mirrorless cameras even starting to _supersede_ DSLRs these days
Few professionals are packing mirrorless as of today. When Canon introduces a mirrorless camera in its one digit series then I will look at giving up my pentaprism. Until then, mirrorless is a pretender, not the champ. Full frame sensor is another story, as are the shutter, iris and flash shoe. It goes on. Even the weight and grip of the camera is a thing. With a nice camera you can frame many shots passably well just by feel, not even looking through the viewfinder or display. Try that with a phone. Really, try it.
you now CAN trigger remote flash with a phone, you CAN have actual control over focus, and you CAN adjust shutter speed
A Poodle CAN walk on its hind legs. Even zoom on a phone is pure crap compared to a physical ring. Take a look at a press scrum and count the number of photogs shooting with cell phones. Right.
No... they were screwed, not by the tariffs but by an extremely weak and conditional business model.
I will quote exactly, again. "The tariffs have played a major role raising prices by almost 80 percent." But you are smarter than they are so you know they didn't say what they actually meant, right? Just trying to follow your tortured logic.
I'm not surprised that today's 64-bit PCs can easily handle emulating those games.
Joke? Hard to tell. Anyway, GTA V on Arch Linux But much more straightforward on a straight up gaming rig, or what the enthusiasts are doing these days, kickass Linux Ryzen workstations that also rock high end games. BTW, 4K Displayport monitors are now really cheap, it's a great time to be a nerd.
Not true, actually. Microsoft now officially supports and invests a lot of money in running Linux both under the Windows desktop and in the cloud. I would go so far as to speculate that Microsoft now has more money invested in this than the sum total of all the work that went into Wine.
But the elephant under the rug is, it's actually better to do it the other way: run Windows in a vm, that way you can keep your critical work and data entirely out of the hands of Microsoft. Microsoft knows this and now has a whole bunch of money invested in various efforts to forestall it. To be honest, it's hard to see that as a bad thing, it's the nearest thing to honest competition I have ever seen from that gang.
It's the new thing, run Windows under Linux. Linux GPU virtualization is even good enough now to run AAA games in a VM. For most of what you do... browsing, social networking, viewing media, the experience is better under Linux now than Windows (e.g., you will never get an upgrade nag while watching a movie.) Not to mention Microsoft won't be spying on most of what you do, except of course for what runs in the VM. You want that to be less every month.
the current administration is run by freaking morons
Are they really morons, if they are successfully transferring wealth from your pocket to theirs? I can think of other words, but moron is not the first one that comes to mind. Ok, moron does comes to mind, but before that comes thug.
it would still be a tiny fraction of what I sold the cases for
They state that tariffs played a major role, do you think they are wrong? They elaborated about shortages and costs up by 80%. Good luck with that, and hope that nothing else goes wrong. Um.
Slashdot Mirror
The standard for i7 is having 8 threads.
Sorry, don't buy that spin. More like, the standard for Intel is to insult my intelligence.
Is the i9 the new i7?
I just came here to post "i9 is the new i7". And i7 is the new i5. I really, really don't appreciate that, it's insulting to my intelligence.
And now I'm the new AMD fan. Oh wait, I'm the old AMD fan returning to the fold after a couple generations in the wilderness. What fun to see Intel playing catch-up with AMD. Though AMD is not Intel's biggest problem, far from it, ARM is.
Before plunging to GPU passtrough, you should test your games with Wine and DXVK. I've been playing No Man's Sky and Fallout 4 with Wine+DXVK in 1440p for a quite a while now, on i7-6700 and GTX1080. Expect some graphic glitch here and there
Speaking of which, I installed Vulkan support on a Debian box a couple days ago and it came up without rebooting or even restarting X. How cool is that? Feeling lucky, I hunted down and installed the Unity Editor. Wow, it works great. Ran through all the tutorials in about 15 minutes, they are pathetic but you get some orientation. Basically, you learn to push the play button and you learn to drag and drop assets onto game objects.
Jumped straight into a demo project and was confused for hours, but eventually broke through to the other side. This is just great, I will double plus unconditionally recommend it. At that point I immediately lost all interest in Windows gaming, why run them when you can make them? To be sure, I haven't got time or energy to make a commercial one, but talk about fun and bang for the buck: $0.00 down and $0.00 a month gets you endless entertainment. Now bringing my kid up to speed on it, who will quickly surpass me. I'll just have to be content being the scripting consultant. I have no problem at all sending $$$ in the general direction of Unity Technology, I just love what they did. Does anybody know about this?
BTW, this seems to be Wine based because of all the dlls, and it also includes Mono as the scripting language, a convincing answer to the question "is Mono really compatible with C#?".
Also ran a bunch of fan-made Linux Unreal engine demos, they are awesome, and Unreal may well be the better engine for the moment. I'm hardly complaining, Unity is way more than enough for me, and Unity Editor is said to be more intuitive. I will be able to weigh in on that myself UDK for Linux lands, which looks imminent.
It's been a couple of years, but last time I checked 3d performance and compatibility with vmplayer was vastly ahead of KVM.
A couple of years ago was exactly when GPU passthrough was under heavy development. Now there are multiple reports of success and I just don't see horror stories. I have no doubt that VMware player was way ahead at the time, I have tremendous respect for their ability to make stuff work, but they also like to wrap it in layers of cruft that you can't avoid. That's a turnoff for me, compared to KVM, which is accessible at every level, including the one I prefer which is simply the command line. I'm perfectly capable of setting up my own disk images, thanks. VMDK is completely irrelevant to me.
Most folks use KVM via virt-manager or similar, I have no data on that. They seem happy, so I am happy for them. I'm happy for you too. :) The world is a better place with VMware in it. At the very least they keep the KVM devs on their toes.
for goodness sake, never record a video without rotating to landscape
Strongly disagree. Shoot video in the orientation that suits the situation, just like stills. Changing the orientation in post processing is trivial.
I think the majority of people would benefit from that sort of advice much more than just "If your memories matter to you that much then get a real camera."
To restate, a mediocre camera, which is the only possible description for even the best phone camera, is perfectly fine for an Eiffel Tower selfie, but pathetic for a wedding, even if you are not the official photographer. You will miss tons of great shots with a phone, never mind the quality.
Some people still care about memories but don't have the time or interest to get serious about photography
Some people think that a Camry is a great car. I avoid discussing cars with them. I also don't disparage people for having no skill or talent for photography, but if somebody styles themselves a photographer, even amateur, that changes things. Let's not have more nonsense about how a phone is as good a camera as a high end DSLR, or even a Rebel.
And yet, the vast majority of the time, you're driving on the street, and the Camry would be the MUCH better choice.
You have no idea what I drive, I can assure you it is not a Camry :)
OK, you think a Camry is a great car and a phone is a great camera. I see the pattern.
What linux virtualization solution would you recommend for hosting Win10 + games with gpu virtualization?
I haven't tried it myself yet, but there are multiple reports of success with Ryzen+KVM+GPU+W10, for example this one.
You say its 'good enough' to run AAA games. What sort of performance hit am I really facing?
My impression is, very little. GPU virtualization gives the guest OS direct access to PCI registers, the overhead can get very close to zero. This report from 2014 shows overhead consistently less than 3%, often a lot less, and remarkably, sometimes actually faster in the VM. I'm not sure how that last one works.
The big overhead for VMs tends not to be CPU, but memory consumption, make sure you have enough to make both host and guest comfortable. You should be fine with 16 GB, but more memory is always better, I'm liking how it feels with 32 GB. You will want a separate SSD for Windows, I think, but that's not going to break the bank.
Do some games "just-not-work" What sort of stability loss am i looking at?
Again, I'm not doing it myself right now (I have too many unplayed games already without a bunch more from Windows) but I see multiple reports of success with GTA 5 and I don't see any horror stories. My feeling is, your system as a whole will be more stable than it is now, and the VM+Windows part of it will be exactly as stable as now.
I've got an i7 and a gtx1080, if that's a factor.
Though I am a newly-minted Ryzen fanboy, I love Intel too except for their business practices. VM stability seems exactly the same for Intel and AMD. That is very cool. Number of VM crashes I had over the years on Intel or AMD: exactly zero, and I really thrash those VMs.
What's the situation with multi-monitor support with something like this?
Dunno. I'm waiting for your report. The question you ought to ask is, what's the situation with sharing the GPU between host and guest? Lots of active discussion on it. It's a thing, and multi-monitor passthrough is a thing.
And peripheral pass through? (usb headsets, usb controllers).
KVM has good USB passthrough, but for mouse and audio where performance is not an issue you probably want the virtual devices. There are a whole pile of online resources on it, e.g. here and the community is active. Mostly people seem to be using libvirt and virt-manager. I don't, I just read the man page and run KVM/QEMU from the command line. Do that only if you enjoy that kind of thing.
There is a great and supportive community here.
My expensive 32 gigs of ram would have to be thrown out for DDR 4 in addition of a new motherboard.
You could ebay it now while it's still worth something :) 32 GB of ddr4 can be had for $280 as of today. My crystal ball says there's a significant ddr4 price drop coming soon.
I don't disagree, waiting is a good option. I am eyeing a 16 core Zen 2 Threadripper build with 64 GB, hopefully it can be done for around $2000 some time in 1H/2019. Hardly a budget box, but great value and easy to justify by faster builds. But what to do with 64 lanes of PCI? Let's see, GPU is just 8, I'm not going to do dual or triple. Four lanes per M.2, then I'm up to 12 or 16, now what? A shame to let it go to waste.
Will KVM work with Intel CPUs that lack VT-d?
You are out there beyond my personal experience. My impression is that it wil but the performance hit is too much for high end gaming.
I bought the 4770 instead of the 4790 because it was cheaper. I regret that choice as it doesn't support I/O pass thru. As a result I am limited to Windows 10/Hyper-V or Virtualbox unless I want to pluck $$$$ for VMWare workstation
Sorry Intel screwed you. Instead of dropping bucks on VMWare, why not change out the 4770 for a Ryzen? A motherboard swap is kind of hard core the first time but its a great skill to learn, and alternatively any decent screwdriver shop can do it in minutes.
Informative thread here.
How is that extinguish thing working out?
I just use vmplayer.
I parted ways with Vmware when KVM (and others) started to get really good. Now, I much prefer KVM. I mean, really strongly prefer. Vmware had its day in the sun.
I feel very obtrusive when I whip out the big box with the long lens, and it intimidates people.
And one more thing... what is not intimidating about waving a cell phone in somebody's face? What is candid about that? To be honest, candid is a bit creepy. I also review with the subject after and invite them to delete if there's an issue.
Intimidating with a big camera is a real thing. It tends to evaporate a few shots in, assuming decent people skills. Otherwise, it's a situation I don't want to be in and will more than happily disengage from. Usually, camera shyness flips to exactly the opposite after seeing the first review image.
The only way it's even useful at all for candids is by utilizing the considerable telephoto capability.
So you can't shoot from the hip? After a couple hundred thousand DSLR shots it became second nature for me. It's far from the only option. Always keeping in mind proper respect for the subject of source.
Which one you personally chose is completely irrelevant...
Rubbish. This is true of pretty much anybody carrying a DSLR. You use the DSLR because it is a beast. Same reason you drive a race car on the track, not a Camry.
Not to mention, with recent mirrorless cameras even starting to _supersede_ DSLRs these days
Few professionals are packing mirrorless as of today. When Canon introduces a mirrorless camera in its one digit series then I will look at giving up my pentaprism. Until then, mirrorless is a pretender, not the champ. Full frame sensor is another story, as are the shutter, iris and flash shoe. It goes on. Even the weight and grip of the camera is a thing. With a nice camera you can frame many shots passably well just by feel, not even looking through the viewfinder or display. Try that with a phone. Really, try it.
you now CAN trigger remote flash with a phone, you CAN have actual control over focus, and you CAN adjust shutter speed
A Poodle CAN walk on its hind legs. Even zoom on a phone is pure crap compared to a physical ring. Take a look at a press scrum and count the number of photogs shooting with cell phones. Right.
No... they were screwed, not by the tariffs but by an extremely weak and conditional business model.
I will quote exactly, again. "The tariffs have played a major role raising prices by almost 80 percent." But you are smarter than they are so you know they didn't say what they actually meant, right? Just trying to follow your tortured logic.
I'm not surprised that today's 64-bit PCs can easily handle emulating those games.
Joke? Hard to tell. Anyway, GTA V on Arch Linux But much more straightforward on a straight up gaming rig, or what the enthusiasts are doing these days, kickass Linux Ryzen workstations that also rock high end games. BTW, 4K Displayport monitors are now really cheap, it's a great time to be a nerd.
you do not see much effort in reverse.
Not true, actually. Microsoft now officially supports and invests a lot of money in running Linux both under the Windows desktop and in the cloud. I would go so far as to speculate that Microsoft now has more money invested in this than the sum total of all the work that went into Wine.
But the elephant under the rug is, it's actually better to do it the other way: run Windows in a vm, that way you can keep your critical work and data entirely out of the hands of Microsoft. Microsoft knows this and now has a whole bunch of money invested in various efforts to forestall it. To be honest, it's hard to see that as a bad thing, it's the nearest thing to honest competition I have ever seen from that gang.
It's the new thing, run Windows under Linux. Linux GPU virtualization is even good enough now to run AAA games in a VM. For most of what you do... browsing, social networking, viewing media, the experience is better under Linux now than Windows (e.g., you will never get an upgrade nag while watching a movie.) Not to mention Microsoft won't be spying on most of what you do, except of course for what runs in the VM. You want that to be less every month.
Dual boot is out, sandboxing Windows is in.
How novel of them!
Did you kick your dog today?
The tariffs have played a major role raising prices by almost 80 percent (partly due to associated shortages)
They stated that the price increase was because of shortages and that tariffs were a major factor. Thanks for playing, Boris.
the current administration is run by freaking morons
Are they really morons, if they are successfully transferring wealth from your pocket to theirs? I can think of other words, but moron is not the first one that comes to mind. Ok, moron does comes to mind, but before that comes thug.
A 25% tariff won't create an 80% cost increase.
But it did, they said so. You can call them liars if you like. You can claim you understand their business better than they do. Good luck with that.
it would still be a tiny fraction of what I sold the cases for
They state that tariffs played a major role, do you think they are wrong? They elaborated about shortages and costs up by 80%. Good luck with that, and hope that nothing else goes wrong. Um.
Can someone explain? The tariffs are designed to help American manufacturing, they make American products cheaper than foreign products
I can explain. You conflate "raw material" with "manufactured product". Intentional, or are you really that thick?