Just to clarify, you don’t need to shrink your storage drive for any VM. I haven’t used Windows for so many years, that I can’t remember can you shrink your C:/ partition, so search for it from your preferred search engine.
For a Linux Newbie Nvidia should not cause problems. Pop_OS! releases their own .iso for their own made Nvidia drivers. Also other Nvidia driver named NVK should be available soon for any distro out of the box and it will remove most (if not all) Nvidia-related problems on Linux. But I bet most Linux-gamers uses Nvidia without issues anyway.
When you’re about to do your first dual booting attempt, I highly recommend to take a backup from your Windows install since it’s your first time so something unexplainable can go wrong.
Ps. Remember this until the rest of your life: no matter how you do it, Windows will always override and format your Linux ESP partition, so you have to always install Windows first and Linux second and preferably with its own ESP.