Virtualization options on Ubuntu - are there others besides virtualbox

Solution 1:

QEMU

QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer.

When used as a machine emulator, QEMU can run OSes and programs made for one machine (e.g. an ARM board) on a different machine (e.g. your own PC). By using dynamic translation, it achieves very good performance.

When used as a virtualizer, QEMU achieves near native performance by executing the guest code directly on the host CPU. QEMU supports virtualization when executing under the Xen hypervisor or using the KVM kernel module in Linux. When using KVM, QEMU can virtualize x86, server and embedded PowerPC, and S390 guests.

QEMU is a member of Software Freedom Conservancy.

Text from QEMU's Official Wiki

IMHO

One of the best Emulators. It does what it promises and it does good. It won't do anything else, it doesn't do a lot of things but emulating a machine. It's worth a try if you wish just to have a machine inside of another machine.

Good luck!

Solution 2:

Another good visualization option for Ubuntu is VMware Workstation but, it is not free, (free as in you have to pay for it and you have no access to the source code).

However, both virtualbox and vmware will give you poor video performance no matter what you do. OS visualization just doesn't provide you with good video performance.

The best solution for you would be to use a bare metal hypervisor such as xenserver. Then, use gpu pass-through to dedicate your Radeon R9-270X to the virtual machine. Below is a video of someone using gpu pass-through to play Battlefield 3.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vCH-7AeNvg