With Windows 10 doing things like this, and Windows 7 being aggressively deprecated, I decided I finally wanted to ditch Windows as my daily driver.  It was good timing, then, that I watched the &quot;7 Gamers 1 CPU&quot; video from LinuxTechTips, which showed me how to do it without sacrificing gaming.<p>Most everything I use runs in Linux, and for the few things that don&#x27;t I can spin up a VM.  But there&#x27;s the caveat that is as old as Windows itself ... gaming.  Dual booting isn&#x27;t an option for me, because I tend to run various server VMs 24&#x2F;7.  I also didn&#x27;t want a second tower just for Windows; that&#x27;s non-ideal.  But wait!  Apparently modern CPUs have this fancy thing called IOMMU I never knew about, which lets you give direct access to PCI-E devices, like GPUs, to a VM.<p>So I bought up a 5820K, a X99 motherboard, and an extra graphics card, and away I went.  I now have Arch Linux running as the host system where I do all my work.  Windows 10 sits in a VM where it&#x27;s given direct and exclusive access to a GTX 970 for graphics.  So far, things are working well and Windows runs the benchmark apps just fine.<p>The end result is that I can use Linux as my daily driver, but flip over to my Windows VM whenever I want to game.  It keeps Windows isolated, which is great from a privacy&#x2F;security perspective, I don&#x27;t have to dual-boot, and best of all I can spin up different VMs if I want to use the beastly GTX 970 for other work like machine learning.  Thanks to using the 5820K which has a few Xeon features in it, the entire process when smoothly.  The biggest caveat is I haven&#x27;t found a DisplayPort switch yet, so I can&#x27;t hook up the Windows VM to my primary Cinema monitor, and I haven&#x27;t nailed down the mouse+keyboard thing yet.  QEMU&#x27;s virtual mouse+keyboard doesn&#x27;t normally work with these kinds of VMs, so you have to hack it in, and even then it likes to randomly stop working.  I could just grab a second set of physical mouse+keyboard but that&#x27;s not ideal.  Steam Steaming will probably be the best option for now.