Although I’m getting old, but I’m still a gamer… Not the ‘hard core’ one, but I still spend considerable amount of time playing games on my PC. And that’s requires a quite powerful – and therefore expensive – hardware, what I would happily use for other purposes too. Like photo editing, 3D modelling, and as a personal test environment.
Any normal guy out there would just install windows, and do everything on the same PC. However, I working in the IT security industry for 20+ years now, and I’m a little(?) bit paranoid, as I’m using Qubes on my laptop as a primary OS. So I do like the idea of ‘partitioning’ my digital life by virtualization. And it is works for everything, but the things do require latency sensitive, real-time 3D rendering:
Gaming.
Up until now, I had a separate machine for gaming, but it was always felt like wasting that hardware, and doing other things on that windows was awkwardly unsafe.
Yes, games are not really focusing on your security, so I would never consider them as trusted software. They might not intentionally ‘steal’ your personal data – as your windows do – but who on earth read all those shady Licence Agreements and Privacy Policies what you have to agree in order to play!? ;) Moreover, they often require anti-cheat solutions, which are technically root kits. So closing all of those inside a Virtual Machine is the best thing we could do.
Why didn’t I do this sooner, then? Well, virtualization is not a new thing, and theoretically this is possible for many years… However, in practice this was always more like a gamble, and the hardware vendors – especially NVIDIA – was not keen making your life easier, unless you have bought their ‘professional’ products with it’s heavy price tag on it. So it was not worth the effort or it was simply not feasible to do so.
And might be that it is still the case.
See the related posts to find out.