Gaming through a Virtual Machine configuration

[Roguetad]

My stepson saved up enough money to purchase all of the components needed to build a decent gaming pc.  His dad has an IT background, and did all of the legwork putting it together.  It's a standard gaming pc with all of the expected components with the exception of one feature.  He designed the pc so that my stepson has to login to a virtual machine to access or play anything online.  I'm not sure exactly how it works, but what I've seen from a pure gaming perspective is that it just doesn't seem to work well.  Maybe it's a good solution for a business, but it seems to be a bottleneck for online gaming. 

He spends most of his time online playing Minecraft with his friends, but he can't do it through the virutal machine, it causes all sorts of weird issues and lag.  Is it possible to game through a virtual machine setup?  Or is this a bad idea from the start?

Again, I don't know anything about the concept or the tech, but having to play through a portal (if that's what it is) seems like a bad idea.  I would think he would be better off just installing games to his local hard drive, using a good local antivirus program, and going straight to the internet.  On the plus side his dad can see and monitor everything he's doing online.  But I can do that locally if I wanted too. 

[gellar]

Depends largely on what the VM setup is.  I can play just about anything pretty much lagfree using VMWare fusion, but that's a pretty good hypervisor (low overhead) and I'm building a pretty beefy VM on top of that.  There's some dropoff in performance, but it's not huge.

If the host hypervisor isn't efficient or if the VM is resource constrained, then yeah I can totally understand it being unplayable. 

[Laner]

That's just weird... his dad must know there are other ways to monitor/prevent malware and not kill gaming performance.

A VM is going to incur a performance penalty, full stop.  Things have come a long way in the past couple of years - 3D acceleration was completely off the table until very recently, so that's something.  And As gellar mentioned, the performance hit can be reduced.  But the bottom line is it's never going to be an ideal situation.

[TheAtomicKid]

It would help if you gave us the hardware specs the VM is running on.

Atomic

[Punisher]

Personally, I've never had much success getting games to run well in a virtual environment.. (i've tried to get it work so I could load beta's and whatnot to avoid issues on the PC..) I just think, it's a case of trying to use the wrong tools for the job... Virtual envirnments weren't really designed for gaming, they were made for business applications for testing and for secured running of software without worrying about viruses and such...
This may also be a case where "background in IT" == computer expert...
I have had to help people fix their PC's because their IT guy tried fixing it... There IT guy designed software for a living and thought he new what he was doing.. (Hey, IT guys... rather then using duct tape to hold the heatsink on, you may want to replace the broken brackets on the motherboard...and thermal grease, is NOT just a suggestion...)

If your' worried that much about viruses, try Deep Freeze or Acronis imaging software and take a clean image of the PC.

[Isgrimnur]

If the guy designed software for a living, he's a programmer, not an IT guy. IT guys deal in hardware and system software, network comm.

I'm a programmer and I couldn't tell a Cisco box from a Crisco box.

[Teggy]

If the guy designed software for a living, he's a programmer, not an IT guy. IT guys deal in hardware and system software, network comm.

I'm a programmer and I couldn't tell a Cisco box from a Crisco box.

[Isgrimnur]Everyone knows Crisco comes in a can.[/Isgrimnur]

[Punisher]

If the guy designed software for a living, he's a programmer, not an IT guy. IT guys deal in hardware and system software, network comm.

I'm a programmer and I couldn't tell a Cisco box from a Crisco box.

That's more of a literacy issue than an IT issue..

But I've had to deal with other IT people in similar situations as well.. they may specialize in Configuring servers, but someone else builds them...people working on computers in general are like doctors… There are GP’s (basic repair people), then the specialists..(Programmers, Server Admin’s, etc..)…

I have also had quite a few customer's tell me that so and so is a Programmer, so they can fix my computer.... many of those have come back with the system worse than before.... I can do a lot of computer repairs, but programming is beyond me (unless you count some Basic i used to do and DOS batch files..)

[Isgrimnur]

If the guy designed software for a living, he's a programmer, not an IT guy. IT guys deal in hardware and system software, network comm.

I'm a programmer and I couldn't tell a Cisco box from a Crisco box.

[Isgrimnur]Everyone knows Crisco comes in a can.[/Isgrimnur]