The VFIO adventure... My wondering into the world of Virtual Machine Gaming... (Round 2, a new fighter has entered the arena.)

Round 2, fight!

This has been a journey that has taken me a long time, since mid 2021 to 2022... It's still not entirely perfect, but it's very much near native... And although I've changed hardware so much on this project; I settled in on the list below. With Ubuntu 22.04 as host.

So... I wanted to up my game and go full tilt with VFIO. I tried the mainstream route with the 3700x and AM4, but I wanted to spare no expense when it came to both my rig and performance. Enter Threadripper...

Host Hardware (Q4 2022):
-Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 1TB (Ubuntu 22.04 Linux)
-XFX 6800 XT is the Host (Linux) GPU.
-Gigabyte TRX40 AORUS MASTER EATX MOBO
-G.Skill 4x32GB DDR4-3600 CL18 RAM

Windows Guest Passthrough:
-32GB Allocated to the VM.
-Onboard Intel GiB NIC
-Gigabyte Aorus RTX 3060 TI
-PCIe USB card (for native USB plug-n-play)
-NVME Samsung 980 Pro 2TB - Passthrough

Software:
-Ubuntu 22.04 Linux
-VFIO (Virtual Function I/O, Native built-in)
-KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine, built-in to the Linux Kernel)
-QEMU (Open-source Hypervisor, CLI)
-Libvirt (Open Source API to manage hypervisors, like QEMU, VMWare, etc...)
-Virt-Manager (GUI Application to manage all the above software pieces.)

After my fiasco with both Manjaro and Fedora, I decided to go with an old friend, Ubuntu... I followed a lot of guides for multiple Linux Distros, but I found the best thus far to be:
https://mathiashueber.com/passthrough-windows-11-vm-ubuntu-22-04/

In that guide, I found a lot of helpful tricks and tips and the biggest I think was setting up huge pages. However, the biggest and most performative tip I found, was not in the guide, but rather in the name.... performance!

In games on the 3700x build, I noticed these little stutters and clips in the frames. In games like Rust, when mining nodes, frames would drop, causing me screen tearing. Even with nvidia settings set to g-sync, I still would get tearing. In my research on the new HEDT build dubbed "Zenith II" I delved deeper into the Linux side of tuning. There is where I found a few key tricks.

In my BIOS I overclocked the 3960x to a stable 4.1GHz, and set PBO to optimized, and thus, frame rates improved drastically. The 3060 TI was a better option in this build, games like Rust saw more stable frame rate. However, still saw some tearing, and so, my research continued. Until I came across the CPU governor settings within Linux. Here, setting my CPU governor setting to "performance" (echo "performance" | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor), the screen tearing almost completely disapeared... Gaming was finally achieved and I started using the rig as my daily driver. And as I upgraded and tuned even more settings. Success was now within reach, round 2, the opponent VFIO is now is 1 'n 1... I have  eventually achieved my "Sorksation".

Now, onto the final version, 3 systems, 1 Sorkstation....