Just for fun... I've managed to get early Vista previews (and Longhorn) working in QEMU through the right combination of hardware. This card is just about old enough that the NVIDIA drivers don't have any "Code 43" VM protection lol

At first, SeaBIOS + passthrough doesn't appear to work at all, which seemed to reinforce all the people who claimed it was problematic. My passed through GPU displayed no image whatsoever. Regardless, after all the frustration I had with UEFI, the handful of people saying SeaBIOS worked fine for ...

Note that the Linux method didn't work for me, but the Windows method did. Try the Windows method if this didn't work. The Linux method won't work either way because (during boot) the kernel ends up modifying the shadow VBIOS that is resident in memory (to enable kernel modesetting, etc), and ...

Some examples of working setups...

Windows 98 (Ryzen 5, Quadro FX 3500, Void Linux) BIOS text-mode rendering (yep, that works!)

Here's a fun fact: QEMU is not the only virtualizer that supports Linux's VFIO API... a few people in the 86box dev community have been working on special branch that allows PCI and PCIe devices to be passed over to an existing 86box config! It's pretty much untested, but so far Windows 98, 2000 ...

This is a bit of an tangent, but with the Windows remark... from what I remember, the softGPU project has a TODO to work on a virGL driver for Windows 9x (as both an OpenGL ICD, and Glide emulated on top). In theory it would be possible to do the same with DirectX by passing it through wined3d ...