I'd suggest using a third-party hypervisor, rather than Hyper-V, as there are only a few cards that are supported for direct passthrough with Hyper-V, and they're all expensive. I know that VirtualBox has some support for 3d graphics processing.
UPDATE: tried playing need for speed Porsche unleashed on an XP VM. Slightly laggy but definitely playable. http://imgur.com/PMWcgA8
[–] SkepticalMartian ago (edited ago)
The problem with virtualization is that unless your hardware directly supports it, you can't dedicate physical video hardware to a virtual machine. This means that the VM will use emulation for video which is often bad from a performance perspective. This may or may not matter depending on the game. Software emulation may be fast enough depending on the title.
If your mainboard and CPU both support hardware virtualization you can install a second video card and dedicate it to the VM. Here is an example of a Linux host operating system running a windows virtual machine with hardware virtualization and two video cards, one of which is dedicated to windows while the VM is running. Performance is quite good, and both the Windows and the Linux displays can be hardware accelerated at the same time.
On intel processors, you can check if you have virtualization technology by downloading the cpu identification tool. Once installed and run, you can check under the "CPU Technologies" tab. If you see Virtualization Technology and VT-x Extended Page Tables as supported, your CPU has support. In supported mainboards, your BIOS will have a setting to toggle virtualization support. My old intel i7 920 supports this quite nicely, and many other modern CPUs in the last 5 years should too.
AMD has a similar technology called AMD-V, but you'll need a different tool to test for support. I don't have any AMDs here to test it with, but the information is definitely out there.
I've done a bit of virtual machine gaming, (Star Trek: Armada 1&2 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein). Biggest issue I've encountered with it was getting the virtual machine running correctly and even then it was a fairly simple process of just booting XP into safemode and installing the correct software. A few games I couldn't get running was Fallout3 and Fear but it was easier to get them running on my native OS than it was to mess around with trying to get them running on a virtualization of XP.
[–] wickedsteve ago
Which games don't work?
[–] WhyWasIHere 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
I'd advise checking out PCGamingWiki, just in case. I recently got Metal Gear Solid 2 to work on Windows 8, which required some stupid workarounds I never would have thought of to try, but I've never been disappointed with their support and explanations. If that fails, though, I guess you should check another comment.
[–] Foul_Knave ago
You can find a rig that plays XP-era games literally in a dumpster, and XP is laughably easy to crack.
[–] pangaea [S] ago
Also if I went the dual boot route I would get some really spectacular performance on modern hardware :P (see my specs in OP)
[–] pangaea [S] ago
I could probably even slap together a rig out of spare parts, perhaps with some dirt cheap ones on Ebay. Though with a VM I can play those games while doing other things on my main machine, or even copy/paste the entire system to other machines.