Games on Qubes + Whonix

[lole...@gmail.com]

Hello! I'm a beginner and maybe ask a stupid question. I know that Qubes OS itself does not support 3D graphics. But can I play games (Steam) if I connect to Qubes Whonix as a virtual machine? It's a Linux distribution and it itself supports Steam. Here it is about Qubes + Whonix: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Qubes.
Thank you!

[Vít Šesták]

Hello,
The main issue with games on Qubes OS is it does not support GPU virtualization at all. So whatever you use (Whonix, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Windows…), you'll get just software rendering. For 3D games, this limits performance very much. Maybe some systems will differ in performance of 3D rendering, but it will be probably far inferior performance.

For example, I was able to run Smokin' Guns (quite old game) on quad-core Sandy bridge i7-2670QM CPU at 1600*900 with occasional lags and about 80% CPU load on all the cores. I was using Debian 9. On Windows 7, even the game menu was very laggy and totally unusable on the same hardware.

You will probably also have issues with mouse input. The game cannot grab the mouse. As a workaround, you can use VNC on loopback and play with input proxy a bit.

Regards,
Vít Šesták 'v6ak'

[Jean-Philippe Ouellet]

On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 9:40 AM, <lole...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello! I'm a beginner and maybe ask a stupid question. I know that Qubes OS itself does not support 3D graphics. But can I play games (Steam) if I connect to Qubes Whonix as a virtual machine? It's a Linux distribution and it itself supports Steam. Here it is about Qubes + Whonix: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Qubes.
> Thank you!

Steam itself works no problem (I've used it in a StandaloneVM). Games
are hit and miss.

Software rendering performance seemed high enough for most 2d games
and even some old / non-demanding 3d games (ancient Unreal games were
"playable"). Really can't say I've spent a lot of time playing them
though, it was more an afternoon project of "Hmm... I wonder if this
works..." than anything else. I'm not a gamer, and my tolerance for
poor gaming performance is quite likely higher than most.

Input grabbing is indeed an issue though as Vit points out.

I should mention this was all on linux, with Windows-only things run
in Wine. I never personally tried on windows HVMs, but they seem
somewhat sluggish even for basic non-game tasks so I'd imagine it
wouldn't be great unless you passed through a dedicated GPU and USB
controller with separate input devices or something.

Cheers,
Jean-Philippe