I know quite a lot about virtualization, so I’d always wondered why graphics performance on a desktop/consumer PC couldn’t be “passed through” with 95% of the original performance as everything else can – so for instance you could run a hypervisor on top of Linux, and then boot up Windows and run games in that with nearly the same performance as a native game in Linux.

I’d always assumed – because I’d never looked into it – that there was some obscure technical reason even though I could not think of one.

Nope, it’s all just vendor gouging.

So to sum up that, because Nvidia (and I am sure AMD too) wants you to buy their $1,500 GPU, they deliberately break the possibility of having decent 3-D GPU performance on consumer cards with virtualization.

Well, that answers the question of why I couldn’t think of any technical reason this shouldn’t be possible.

Because it is possible, and is done already (if you buy the $1,500 GPU), but it’s just blocked for consumer use.