The native isolation mechanisms like silos are things that require wrangling by professional sysadmins, I didn't even know they existed until I started writing this post. The real question to be asking is why is sandboxing so bad on Windows? Despite some searching, I still have no conclusive answer as to how to go about filesystem isolation in Win32-space, or if it's even possible.
It's great for testing, and Sandbox is just the tip of the iceberg of what Windows Containers support
- e.g. maybe someone can come up with "launcher" that goes through it (somehow).
Personally I'm coping with sandboxie.
Consider that people pay a $300 premium to get ~10% better performance (buying an RTX 5080 instead of a 5070 Ti).
Personally I know that sometimes closing the web browser in the background makes my game run better - that web browser doesn't even interact with the game! Would a sandbox have a smaller impact?
Buying a better GPU improves your graphics performance and that's basically unrelated to the area where a sandbox impacts performance.
Killing your web browser is probably just lowering memory pressure?
Sandboxes add overhead to syscalls. It's kind of similar to running under Wine, which also adds significant syscalls overhead. Wine also has a much more impactful DirectX translation layer, so your sandbox performance would be probably be much better than the Wine performance.
That’s hard to believe, given that many games run better under WINE than native Windows.
On Linux certainly so, and I think if Steam is installed as a flatpak all games naturally are sandboxed.
They also need low-latency access to the GPU, which I suspect is a fertile vector for privilege escape exploits.
In theory, sandboxing mechanisms could even be used to improve anticheat.
What I always sort of assume the endgame could be for highly competitive Windows games is something akin to cartridge or bootable floppy games from the 8-bit era, where games would install into or be supplied as disk images containing locked-down Windows installations that only permit signed (and possibly whitelisted) drivers and whitelisted applications, which would include the game and a small number of other approved applications like Discord, MS Edge and possibly selected third-party browsers, and support software for hardware like GPUs and gaming input devices, which Windows would then boot to run the game, either on bare metal or in an isolated VM.
https://gist.github.com/q3k/e5952111283ea59ee78a7699919a055b
