Win 8.1 Slow (Too Slow for Gaming)

[milse]

I'm pretty new to VirtualBox. I created a Windows 8.1 VM to run a game that is only for PC. (The game is MTG Arena. I'll post requirements below.) I'm able to play the game, but it's so slow as to be almost unplayable.

My Mac:
Early 2015 MacBook Air
OSX 10.12.6
Intel Core i5 (4 cores)
8GB RAM

I've tried:
- Allocating 2 cores (I feel like what I really need is to be able to give the guest a 3rd core, but that doesn't seem possible in the GUI, at least.)
- 5 GB RAM for the guest. (I've been running the VM without running anything else on OSX. With the game going, I'm usually using about 7.7 of 8 GB RAM.)
- Installing guest additions.
- Enabling 3D acceleration and upping video memory to 256 MB.
- In Windows, turning battery usage to "High Performance."

Game Requirements:
Minimum Requirements:
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5600+ or Equivalent
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 8800 or Equivalent
RAM: 2 GB
Operating System: Windows 7

Recommended Requirements:
Processor: Intel Core2 Quad Q9300 @ 2.50GHz
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 560
RAM: 4 GB
Operating System: Windows 10

Is there anything I'm missing? Am I just expecting too much from my little laptop? Is there something else you need to know? Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks!

[milse]

Also, here is the log for the VM, if that helps.

milse

[scottgus1]

Am I just expecting too much from my little laptop?

Could be. Gaming in a virtual machine isn't going to be a hot activity, unless it's Minesweeper...

There's a lot of these in the log:

00:10:32.650115 VMMDev: vmmDevHeartbeatFlatlinedTimer: Guest seems to be unresponsive. Last heartbeat received 4 seconds ago

and this doesn't look hopeful:

00:00:23.561072 AIOMgr: Host limits number of active IO requests to 16. Expect a performance impact.

though I don't know if it's really a problem.

Macs can be dual-boited and can run Windows natively, I hear. You might do better trying this method.

fwiw, adding processors slows down the guest, due to needing more scheduling overhead on the host.