I will research this, but it was my understanding the default GPU is passed through, just not a dGPU, without specific settings. So I just assumed whatever the iGPU can do in the host, it would mostly do in the guest.
I would not even attempt W11, it’s worse than 10 on resource usage, etc.
One thing I am encountering in Oracle, is MS notifies that a suitable display driver is not installed and that this will affect screen resolution, battery life (n/a) and performance. Yet performance is much snappier in Oracle vs QEMU. We did use the virtio.iso in the latter, so no notification of this issue there.
The host always drives the GPU, a VM, whether QEMU or Oracle makes no different, a VM will only run as well as the host hardware.
If you game, then a Windows VM, cannot compete with a Windows hard install!!!
There are only two GPU drivers for a VM, vmware and virtualbox, some distros like Gentoo, have a hard time with the VMSVGA setting but work well with the VBoxSVGA setting, this also depends on what GPU the host is running. Bottom line is, one can have the best GPU, money can buy, but it makes little difference to a VM, although the amount of host ram, and what can be allocated to the VM does.
As for as performance, between QEMU and Oracle VirtualBox, and I have ran both, VirtualBox wins hands-down.
@Daniel_Phillips this laptop runs great in Pop OS, including gaming via Crossover for Windows games. The casual games only use the iGPU and since that is what the VM is using, I expected casual games, at least, would perform okay. But as you pointed out, and I alluded to, only having 8 gb ram can affect performance.
I intend to allot more and see if that helps. As I said before, Linux meets all of my needs, but a few customers require Windows, thus the reason for the VM.
I never said your laptop does not run Pop OS well, but with only 8 gig of ram, and playing by the rules, only 50% should be allocated to any VM. What is the max capability’s of ram for your laptop?
I’ve been reading up on the GPU in VM subject and am finding a lot of info that says it is not passed through (I thought the iGPU was since it is in the CPU from Intel) and that there are ways to slice it and give some to the guest, but a lot of instability in that as well.
@Daniel_Phillips So why does Vbox run W10 and installed apps so much better than QEMU?
I have encountered the following in QEMU:
Low volume (not using my BT speaker connected to Host Linux)
Laggy performance
Other issues related to web browsing
Whereas in VBox, none of these occur, using same Ram/CPU specs. That same casual game I tried in QEMU last night was unplayable, yet in VBox, it works fine, almost as it would natively in W10.
It is true one can enable virtualization for a CPU in the bios, but very few attributes are passed from the CPU to the VM. Any VM is controlled more by the software than by the host!! If it was different I would be running WXP and W7 in a VM and be playing my old games, and not have to have a hard install, so I keep an old XP machine, just for that purpose.
That one is easy!!! Simply because Oracle VirtualBox is more compatible with Windows, than QEMU. Even running VirtualBox in a Linux distro does not work as well!! It is the age-old dispute over the Windows/Linux which-is-best issue.
Agree.
I would add, virt-manager is more compatable with Linux than Virtualbox is.
When running a linux guest in a linux host with virt-manager , the performance is industinguishable from a hard installed linux.
Vbox performs quite well in that case too, but in my experience not quite as good as virt-manager.
The other benefit of virt-manager is that one can also use virsh on the same VM file, ie run it in background without a
console.
Well, after my research & testing today, I decided it is not worth using the passthrough. In QEMU, I did not even see much difference when I added 4gb RAM with a total of 12 gb over the maximum 8gb.
And since my only purpose in installing W10 was for client use, I will use the Oracle for W10. But now that I know that virt-manager runs well on my current Pop OS, I can feel free to experiment with other Linux systems, not based on Ubuntu. So far, I only kept installing different distros on separate computers.
Of course, my next project is the home server setup, and that is going to be far more intensive than this exercise has been.