this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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Linux

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I don't know if this is common knowledge but I hadn't found anything on the web (for Windows specifically) that stated that this was possible.

I kinda badly want to fully switch to Linux in the short term but wanted to first properly test how different distros feel at these specs (and maybe try some basic gaming too); maybe someone that wants to do the same can find this post useful (I hope this is the right community to post to).

To do this I used QEMU, and had to edit the source code and recompile it to enable 240hz. Forcing higher refresh rates is surprisingly not that hard, I only had to edit a single line of code (hw\display\edid-generate.c, line ~390, set '75000' to '240000'). So far Mint, Fedora and KDE Neon work perfectly at that refresh rate (after adjusting mouse input polling rates), then I added a couple other nice features like shared clipboard and mouse device toggling (I tested q2pro and it wouldn't work with absolute mouse coordinates, and relative mouse was a pain to use in normal desktop browsing, so I had to find a way to toggle them if I didn't want to reboot the VM every time).

This is my very first lemmy post (hi fedi!), I wrote this lengthy blog post detailing how I did everything, hopefully I'm allowed to post it here (reddit traumatized me with the blanket banning).

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (2 children)

If you fully make the jump to Linux, you should test from the other side with QEMU+KVM and see about spinning up a Windows VM with GPU passthrough.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago

I did exactly that when I switched to Linux a couple of years ago. Took around a week to setup, it runs well enough, but you lose the use of your main gpu under Linux that way. I tried lutris for gaming under linux and quickly realised the games run very well via wine. O in my opinion the qemu windows with gpu passtrough is not really worth the hassle nowadays. All games I tried work just as well via wine/proton.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Yep my intention is to do that as soon as I switch, honestly the biggest obstacle for me right now is gaming (I'm unfortunately on an nvidia gpu so I'd get like 20% or more performance penalty with the drivers currently shipped for most distros, a little too much for me) hopefully it'll get even better

[–] [email protected] 5 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

That 20% performance hit on linux is only for dx12 games. The rest are fine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago

Ah I hadn't looked deep enough then, thank you I'll look better into it

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If you try to run the game from the windows vm yes the perf are bad.

But try to play these game from linux using wine/lutris ou protom/steam and you could be surprised

My games were running better (really better) on archlinux than windows 11. And i have also a nvidia card (RTX 3090 FE)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 19 hours ago

Same, I exclusively use Linux for gaming now that the performance is better on my machine in most games.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

maybe you could try doing gpu passthrough for native performance