Question Is Microsoft Going to Screw Its Customers?

[igor_kavinski]

My main use case was just to have a snappy smooth windows VM for a few simple apps I use from time to time since the GPU was only $12 on ebay.

You could do a Geekbench OpenCL or Vulkan test before and after to see how much the performance improves with passthrough.

 

[Zepp]

Turns out "VMware workstation exposes a software based GPU to the guest VM which then gets translated (to the best of it's ability) to your hardware GPU running on your host." so that's the black magic. Installing the guest drivers on virt-manager also does the same thing, though not quite as smooth as vmware's implementation.

You could do a Geekbench OpenCL or Vulkan test before and after to see how much the performance improves with passthrough.

I downloaded geekbench, but it doesn't even register the software 'virtual' GPU so none of the benchmarks are available to run.

BTW, how do you have your CPU topology in vmware(sockets, cores, threads)? I read conflicting info on what's optimal for smooth performance.

 

[igor_kavinski]

BTW, how do you have your CPU topology in vmware(sockets, cores, threads)? I read conflicting info on what's optimal for smooth performance.

I tried it a few weeks back on my 245KF and let it have all the cores. On VirtualBox, you get this warning that performance may be degraded if you assign all cores to the VM so I was expecting something like that but no. And then the VM benchmarks made me very pleased with the performance. It seems VMware has been designed to co-exist with other applications very well. It didn't seem to have any of the clunkiness that I usually expect from VirtualBox. It just felt like I was remotely using a different PC instead of a VM.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I had decided many years ago that I wouldn't pursue any curiosity about running VMs.

I just now managed to get a smooth installation of the " . . . . 5770" update to the first 25H2 update for Windows 11. That's enough extra chores for me. It's 5:30PM, and tomorrow is another day. This is enough for on day in the 78-year-old life experience, I tell ya!