I think the current received wisdom on Linux gaming boils down mainly to three letters: AMD. As a company they’re “friendlier” to Linux for drivers and such.

That said, I’m running an 11th gen intel i7 and nvidia 3080 and not having any problems. I haven’t tried starfield yet but Baldur’s Gate 3 runs like a champ.

I’d still recommend getting an AMD graphics card and generally prioritizing hardware with upstream drivers. As in, drivers that are included with the kernel itself. The experience is always better. Overall it’s still a good habit to look up how any hardware runs on Linux before buying it.

Gaming in a Windows VM is possible but it was a big ordeal when I did it. You have to make sure your CPU and motherboard support IOMMU for PCI passthrough. It’s less of a problem nowadays but there are still some pitfalls with PCIe lanes and whatnot. You need two video adapters, one for the host and one for the guest (because the host has no access to the passed-through GPU) and if you want to game on both Windows and Linux that can be a pain in the ass. It goes on. I personally don’t recommend it. If you have to play trashy eSports that ship with built-in anti-cheat malware then just Windows for that.

I’d suggest Intel for networking and an AMD graphics card if you want things to work out if the box.

I think one of the most impactful choices in my last build was choosing a fast SSD. Not all SSDs are the same! Nowadays you can get NVMe drives that operate over PCIe instead of SATA which provide much higher throughput.

You can either get an M.2 form factor that plugs into a special socket on the motherboard and takes up minimal space, or a PCI card that plugs into the same type of slot as a graphics card. (Note that some M.2 drives / sockets are SATA, not NVMe, so watch out for that distinction.)

There is also some difference between NVMe implementations depending on which PCIe version they support. And you’ll want a motherboard that implements the same PCIe version. This applies to both M.2 and PCIe SSDs.

This stuff might be old enough that you’ve already encountered it. But it was new to me when I built my last PC in 2020. Other than that building was pretty much as I remembered from previous decades.

I’m interested in running Windows in a QEMU VM to avoid some of the pitfalls for certain multiplayer experiences in certain titles.

This may not be such a good idea. Many multiplayer games detect VMs and can ban your account. It’d best to keep Windows around in a dual-boot setup if you’re intending to play online games. In saying that, are you up-to-speed with the current developments in Proton? If not, you should check ProtonDB to see if the games you’re playing is supported now or not. Proton receives updates quite regularly, and more and more games are becoming compatible with every new release.

Beyond that, you can’t really go wrong with an all-AMD build: AMD CPUs are better for gaming in general, and AMD GPUs have excellent support in Linux (you only need the opensource drivers btw, so you don’t need to install anything special or proprietary).

If you are going to get WiFi, try to get Intel Wi-Fi, it’s usually pretty solid.

Outside of that, AMD is generally better for graphics (esp. if you’re interested in messing with Wayland) and CPU is fine with both. I don’t think RTX or DLSS really works on Linux, but I could be wrong there.

But honestly, pretty much everything works fine. I used NVIDIA and a ghetto WiFi chip set for years and it was fine. I couldn’t use Wayland and variable refresh didn’t work properly with my dual monitor setup, but eveningy else worked fine.

So I wouldn’t put a ton of energy into Linux compatibility, unless there’s something that you really need to ensure stays compatible.