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I didn’t expect one of my more entertaining gaming experiments this year to start inside Proxmox. Usually, when I spin up a VM, I’m thinking about services, testing, or something useful for my home lab. I’m not expecting to pass through a GPU, boot Windows 11, and end up benchmarking Cyberpunk 2077 on a mini PC. Yet that’s exactly what happened, and the result was a lot better than I had any right to expect.
The host in question is my ASUS NUC 14 Pro+ with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and Intel Arc Graphics, and I gave the Windows 11 VM 4 CPU cores and 16GB of RAM. Once I got GPU passthrough working, this stopped feeling like a nerdy stunt and became a genuinely interesting way to get more out of a compact Proxmox box. It’s still a compromise in some obvious ways, but it’s the kind of compromise that makes you sit up a little straighter.
From ROG Enemy back into my ROG Best Friend, at least in theory
The most important part of this build wasn’t Windows 11 itself, nor was it even the mini PC. It was GPU passthrough. Without that piece falling into place, this would’ve just been another virtual machine doing ordinary VM things, which is fine, but not especially exciting. Once the Intel Arc Graphics was passed through correctly, though, the guest OS stopped behaving like a polite fake desktop and started acting like a gaming PC with something real under the hood.
That sounds simple when you write it in one sentence, but it absolutely was not simple in practice. Getting passthrough working was a beast, and I’d be lying if I said there was a neat, universal checklist that made it painless. It felt more like stumbling into the right alchemical formula after enough trial, error, and muttered complaints. Even then, I wouldn’t pretend my exact path will translate neatly to someone else’s setup, because this sort of thing is famously sensitive to hardware quirks, firmware choices, and whatever mood the platform wakes up in that morning.
Ultimately, the key to getting GPU passthrough working properly on my mini PCs Intel Arc graphics was the work done beforehand by Github user LongQT-sea. Their guide and the ROM files they provided were the missing link I needed to achieve full GPU passthrough, even through the PC’s HDMI port.
Still, that’s part of why the end result impressed me so much. I wasn’t borrowing a desktop GPU or building around some giant tower with spare headroom everywhere. This was a mini PC doing double duty as a home lab host and, when asked nicely enough, a Windows gaming machine. That kind of flexibility is hard not to admire. Once I had it running, it felt less like I’d forced the hardware into something unnatural and more like I’d uncovered a capability it had been hiding from me.
If I wanted to flatter this setup, I wouldn’t have started with Cyberpunk 2077. It’s still one of those games that can expose weak spots in a hurry, and it gives you plenty of room to overestimate your hardware. That’s exactly why I used it. If this Proxmox VM could survive Cyberpunk without embarrassing itself, I’d have a much easier time believing it could handle the kinds of games normal people actually play regularly.
My first benchmark run used the default values I had set, and the average frame rate came in at 24.82 FPS, with a minimum of 21.03 and a maximum of 29.46. That’s not a magical result, but it is a real one, and I think that matters more. This wasn’t some paper launch fantasy where everything sounds better than it feels. It landed in the very honest territory of “playable if you’re willing to tune,” which is already a win for a Windows 11 VM inside Proxmox on a mini PC.
Things got more interesting once I nudged texture detail down to Medium. That pushed the Cyberpunk 2077 average up to 29.57 FPS, with a minimum of 25.24 and a maximum of 35.21. That’s the kind of jump that changes the mood of the whole experiment, because it shows the setup responds well to sensible compromises instead of collapsing under the weight of virtualization overhead. In other words, this wasn’t the VM begging for mercy. It was the game asking me to stop being so ambitious. Those benchmark results from Cyberpunk 2077 made that pretty clear.
Cyberpunk was the headline test, but it wasn’t the only game I tried. I also spent time with Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Stardew Valley, and Where Winds Meet, which gave me a better sense of how broad the appeal of this setup really is. That matters because one decent benchmark can still be a fluke if everything else feels rough. A handful of different games tells a more useful story, especially when they span very different kinds of demands.
Stardew Valley, unsurprisingly, didn’t exactly stress the machine into an existential crisis. It’s the kind of title that makes this entire project feel almost silly in a good way, because of course, a Windows VM with passed-through graphics can handle it. Mass Effect Legendary Edition and Where Winds Meet were more revealing, though, because they sit much closer to the sort of workload that can expose awkward bottlenecks. Those games helped confirm that this wasn’t just a one-game curiosity. It was a setup with real, if limited, versatility.
The rough edges also became easier to identify once I moved beyond pure benchmarking. I noticed some input lag, and I strongly suspect RDP was the main culprit rather than the VM’s raw gaming performance. Audio and video also tended to stutter right when games first launched, which wasn’t ideal, but that usually settled down after about 20 to 30 seconds. Once things stabilized, the overall experience was much easier to enjoy. That doesn’t make those annoyances disappear, but it does make them feel manageable instead of fatal.
I skipped Moonlight on purpose. I know that a Sunlight and Moonlight setup probably would’ve cut latency and made gameplay feel smoother. I didn’t use it here because I wanted to test the VM closer to its raw state, not after adding a streaming layer built to hide its rough edges. RDP gave me a harsher, more honest baseline, which makes these results more impressive, not less.
As much as I enjoyed this experiment, I’m not about to pretend Proxmox virtualization is suddenly the best mainstream way to build a gaming PC. A bare-metal Windows install is still easier to set up, troubleshoot, and live with if your main goal is just to play games. There are fewer moving parts, fewer weird edge cases, and far less opportunity for one tiny setting to ruin your evening. That simplicity still matters, especially if you’re not the sort of person who enjoys debugging for sport.
There’s also the question of resource sharing, which hangs over any project like this, whether you mention it or not. I gave this VM 4 CPU cores and 16GB of RAM, and that’s enough to make it feel like a serious test rather than a halfhearted demo. But those resources are still being carved out of a machine that may have other jobs to do. If your Proxmox host is also handling services, containers, or other VMs, gaming can quickly stop being a bonus and start becoming a scheduling problem.
Then there’s the setup pain, which is real and worth respecting. GPU passthrough can be deeply annoying, and even after it works, you may still end up chasing odd behavior that a traditional gaming PC simply doesn’t have. Add in the input lag I saw over RDP and the brief launch-time stuttering, and you’ve got a pretty clear reminder that this isn’t friction-free. Anyone looking for the cleanest, most straightforward path to PC gaming should absolutely buy or build something more conventional. That argument has teeth, and I don’t think pretending otherwise helps anybody.
What keeps this project interesting to me is that it doesn’t need to beat a traditional gaming PC to justify itself. It only needs to prove that a compact home lab machine can stretch much further than most people assume. That’s exactly what this ASUS NUC 14 Pro+ did. It hosted a Windows 11 VM from its NVMe SSD, handled GPU passthrough once I bullied it into cooperating, and delivered gaming results good enough to make me stop smirking and start paying attention.
I also think something is refreshing about a setup that succeeds without pretending to be perfect. This wasn’t a cinematic, ultra-settings fantasy machine, and it never needed to be. What it offered was something more practical and, honestly, more fun: evidence that a mini PC in Proxmox can become a respectable gaming box when the stars line up and you’re willing to meet it halfway. That’s a more compelling story to me than yet another reminder that expensive dedicated gaming hardware is fast.
The best part is how this changes the mental category I put mini PCs into. I already knew they were useful for home lab work, light servers, and virtualization projects. What I didn’t expect was to come away thinking they could also serve as surprisingly capable gaming machines in the right context. Once you’ve seen that happen, it’s hard to go back to thinking of them as merely practical little boxes. They start to feel a lot more ambitious than their size suggests.
What really astounded me wasn’t that this setup broke records. It was that a Proxmox host on a mini PC got close enough to a legitimate gaming PC experience that I stopped treating it like a gimmick. Cyberpunk 2077, averaging 24.82 FPS at one setting and 29.57 FPS with a smarter texture choice, isn’t the sort of result that rewrites the market, but it absolutely changes how I think about what this class of hardware can do. Once you layer in other games, fast NVMe storage, and a stable-enough experience after the initial hiccups, the whole project starts to feel far more serious than it sounds.
What really astounded me wasn’t that this setup broke records. It was that a Proxmox host on a mini PC got close enough to a legitimate gaming PC experience that I stopped treating it like a gimmick.
No, I wouldn’t recommend this as the easiest way to get into PC gaming. But I would absolutely recommend it as proof that a well-equipped mini PC can be much more flexible than most people give it credit for. For me, that’s the real takeaway. This tiny Proxmox box didn’t just run virtual machines. It built a Windows 11 gaming PC inside one, and somehow made the result feel a lot more believable than it had any business being.
This tiny mini PC packs hardware that rivals many tower PCs.