Hey everyone!
I'm the developer of VMDB, a community driven compatibility database that I originally built for people gaming inside virtual machines.
The basic idea is pretty simple. Instead of trying to answer "does this game work in a VM?" through scattered forum posts and old comments, VMDB collects reports from actual users and their configurations in one place.
Reports can include things like the host and guest OS, CPU and GPU, GPU passthrough, virtualization platform, anti cheat, required tweaks, performance and other details. This is especially useful with anti cheat, where compatibility can depend heavily on the exact setup.
Over the last few months VMDB has grown quite a bit, and very recently I also added Proton compatibility reports. Proton wasn't the original purpose of VMDB, but it fits the same idea really well: community reports about whether a game works and under which conditions.
VM and Proton reports are kept separate, so if you only care about Linux and Proton you can use VMDB purely for that. Likewise, the original VM side remains its own thing.
There's also a Games section for browsing the database, filtering games by compatibility and other properties, and discovering what you might actually be able to play. You don't need an account to browse or read reports.
VMDB is still relatively young. It's only about five months old, so the amount of Proton data in particular is obviously nowhere near something established like ProtonDB yet. That's something only time and community contributions can change.
If you'd like to take a look:
Feedback is absolutely welcome, especially from Linux gamers. If something feels confusing, is missing, or could be improved, I'd genuinely like to hear it.
Thanks for checking it out!
ia protondb not good enough? why did you replicate their functionality?
ProtonDB doesn't track gaming under a virtual machine. That seems to be the main focus here. I was thinking of installing a VM for gaming specifically, especially QEMU/KVM, so this would be an useful resource to have. Also it covers non Steam games too, which is not only helpful for VMs but also covers Proton for those too, which ProtonDB does not.
Go for it. I had great experience with it so far with my Cachy VM in Proxmox.
The only true headaches I faced were related to usb passthrough and bluetooth headphones when accessing it "directly".
Remotely though, using Sunshine/Moonlight, it was a breeze.
Thanks. I have experience with USB Passthrough (to update gamepad firmware in example), which works great on QEMU with KVM. But need to figure out GPU passthrough. There is also Winboat, that is basically a virtual machine managing Windows installs. It eases the process by downloading Windows image and installing it for you. And tries to integrate the installed applications in the VM as a desktop app on Linux, if I understand this correctly. They are working on GPU passthrough too.
These are the two options I'm considering. No remote access from a different device or streaming planned.
Does protondb list games which specifically block running inside VM as well?
Nope, it's specific to proton. Some reviewers add other details to that effect in commentary, but the site doesn't support or surface that information.
Exactly, and that's actually the original reason I built VMDB. VM compatibility is treated as its own thing rather than something buried in a comment.
A game can work perfectly fine through Proton while behaving completely differently inside a VM, especially when anti cheat is involved. VMDB lets people report that together with the actual VM configuration, passthrough setup, host and guest OS, required tweaks and so on.