It's not that hard to setup these days honestly, I think the requirement of having 2 GPUs is a turnoff for a lot of people though.
And I think it's been catching on a lot more now that both Intel offers VT-d standard in most of it's chips. So does AMD with its SVM equivalent.
I like this approach Valve is taking better than resorting to VMs though. I'll probably continue to use my GPU passthrough setup for now but when the game compatibility on this gets better I'll likely switch.
So an intel CPU + discrete GPU fills the requirement?
Also novidia is known to block driver installs from a VM because “you should be using a professional GPU for that” but there are ways to trick the installer.
I'm using VMs but not for gaming, just running Linux guests on Linux host. virgl works pretty well now for that purpose. But what's really missing is SR-IOV. AMD so far didn't want to support it in regular cards.
If I imagine the average PC gamer, I don't think they would be able to troubleshoot any problems. Once you get into setting up storage pools (libvirt) or having to edit the libvirt XML file (want to have host native Audio?) and of course installing all those drivers for optimal performance (digging up the correct CD image and mounting it is not trivial either.
And I think it's been catching on a lot more now that both Intel offers VT-d standard in most of it's chips. So does AMD with its SVM equivalent.
I like this approach Valve is taking better than resorting to VMs though. I'll probably continue to use my GPU passthrough setup for now but when the game compatibility on this gets better I'll likely switch.