Hello and a big thanks to everyone sharing their experience in this thread.
Thought I'd post my VM gaming lab build here:
MB: Asus Crosshair IV Formula 890FX
CPU: AMD Phenom II 955BE
RAM: Kingston HyperX 2x4Gb KH1600C9D3K4
GPU1: Asus Radeon EAH6950 DCUII
VM OS: Windows 8 Pro
This is running on ESXi 5.0.0 build 914586 with a Intel PRO/1000PT NIC.
ESXi is installed on a cheapo Kingston USB stick and as a test VM datastore i use a Intel 330 SSD 180GB.
VM Tools was installed directly after the OS.
Did vga passthrough and installed the latest AMD drivers 13.1 but selected custom installation and used only the drivers, no CCC or additional software.
VGA passthrough works actually really well. Had initially some slight problems but after changing the settings of the VM to 2gb ram, 1 socket with 4 cores i have been playing many hours now of Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 without any problems. 20-30 normal shutdowns, reboots with no problems. VM is set to autostart after 2 minutes and if i didn´t know this was a VM i wouldn´t have given it much thought.
I then did the PCI passthrough of a ST Lab cheapo USB 2.0 card.
Connected to this USB card is a D-Link Usb 5-ports hub with keyboard, mouse and Asus Xonar U3 soundcard.
Windows 8 just recognized everything connected and installed all the drivers without me even lifting a finger.
Just started learning ESXi but reading comments in this thread has really helped me a lot.
-Kenneth