Gaming on a Virtual Machine?

Not at all. I stopped trying 3 years ago because it’s been hopeless for many years.

Is this a hardware or software problem? Or maybe just a VirtualBox issue?

Shouldn’t be a hardware problem, not sure about software. I mean, you have the off/on checkbox and that’s basically it.

It should be feasible to run a 2003 3d game using a gtx1080. Maybe not on highest quality, but even the lowest settings are a slideshow

When I had a gtx980ti it was a slide show with 3d games from the late 90s

I played 2 games with a VM windows. The set up was/is Virt-Manager, Libvirt/QEMU/KVM, VFIO-GPU passthrough, evdev-passthrough.

My computer is set up in a way that it dynamically binds/unbinds my 6800 XT to the virtual machine as the VM is started/stopped. This works like a charm, after some years of fiddling around and finding a good script. The performance is around 95% of a real windows PC, which is quite good.

What you need for a setup like this is:

  • motherboard with good VFIO/IOMMU support
  • motherboard with an iGPU (however this is still possible with a single GPU, just not as useful, IMO)
  • optimised setup and settings for the VM for it to run as smooth as possible
  • 2 monitor outputs (or a dummy display for the VM)
  • lots of patience

I still have my setup, just in case I ever need windows for something. Maybe I’ll return to Warzone now that Verdansk is back.

Edit: here’s a reddit post I made after successfully setting everything up.
Success