Hi,

I'm planning to buy a laptop with no default Windows installed since I'll be installing CentOS on it. However, I'd like to play Dota 2, and I have no plan on using wine. Is anybody here playing Windows games in a VM, say VirtualBox? Is the performance acceptable? I'm kind of concerned about the graphics performance.

Cheers!

Dota 2 works native on linux, I tried it once a long time ago. This was under ubuntu, I don't know about CentOS.

Regarding your question: Graphics performance is only acceptable if one uses Virtualbox's "PCI passthrough" functionality, which can dedicate a whole graphics card to the guest windows' graphics driver. But you need a second graphics card for that, which rules out most notebooks.

Virtual Box guest tools should be installed in Windows in VM. It will provide some acceleration. But I don't know whether Dota 2 would run or not.

VirtualBox's OpenGL virtualization sucks. The reason is that a virtualized guest needs to use special VirtualBox graphics drivers.

Visual novels should play well, but not 3D intensive games like DOTA2.

Fortunately, DOTA2 (as mentioned) is Linux native.

why Virtual Box ???

CentOS 7.0 has KVM built in to the OS

Graphics performance is native speed under KVM with VGA passthrough, if your notebook has intel graphics and a AMD or Nvidia card, as some do, that'd be a solution... or you could dual boot.

When I played games in a virtual machine, I used http://www.vmware.com/products/workstation. One of the games I used was http://maplestory.nexon.net/landing/. At the time, my graphics card was NVidia GeForce 256 MB, but the graphic card has failed after 3 years of use. The virtual machine did depend on the host graphic driver.

IIRC that needs hardware IOMMU support. Doubt notebooks have that. Besides, most such dual solutions cannot function as 2 separate cards AFAIK.

If the game's important to you, what if you flipped the scenario end-for-end?

Go ahead and install Windows on the box, as its native operating system.

(As a matter of course, I purchase fully-licensed retail versions of the Windows-OS that I need, "wipe the sucker clean," and install from that distribution media. Yes, "I give the devil his due," and never give "OEM versions" the time-o-day.)

Then, install Linux into a virtual machine, using VirtualBox or a commercial product such as VMWare, and let Windows be the host.

I suggest that you use an entirely separate disk drive ... whether internal, or FireWire-equivalent externally connected ... to host the Linux VM. In other words, don't monkey-around with partitioning or dual-booting or any of that. An entirely separate disk drive supporting the needs of a virtual Linux machine, on a Windows host that is known to be suitable (both in terms of hardware and software) for running that game.

If "the game" is the deal-maker ... if it is "The Killer App™" ... then: "so be it." Let it be the Killer App, and base your hardware decisions accordingly. You may be dumbfounded to discover that Microsot Windoze is actually a perfectly satisfactory host built by very competent software engineers.