MacOS Host and Guest - Laggy Performance

[Reuven]

Hi. Relatively new to VirtualBox, and I'm running a macOS Catalina guest on a macOS Catalina host, using VB 6.1. I've tried playing around with some settings, and I have a relatively powerful Mac (MacBook Pro 16", 2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9, 64GB RAM) but some very basic functions are still very laggy in the guest. Mouse movement lags a few milliseconds behind, and scrolling through Photos is super-laggy.
I'm attaching my latest logs. Any suggestions as to what settings I can/should change to fix this, and make my guest as performant as my host for basic app usage (especially Photos)?

Thanks,
Reuven

[alexrich12]

Hi Reuven,

Not quite sure why MacOS Catalina would be as slow as you described especially on the type of Host Mac with those specs. One possible reason that could be causing the issue is video memory, go to settings, then display and click and enable the checkbox "Enable 3D acceleration" then turn the video memory dial all the way up. Then start the VM. I'm not sure if this is 100% the issue, but it could be that MacOS is just not very fast in a VM. Be sure to allocate half of your RAM and put the VM at its max recommend settings. I hope this helps !

[Berg]

It's because retina resolution issue not resolved
I also have a slow performance on the 2k outer display directly via type-c , but when I set resolution 1920x1080 - works good
for my 13" MB Pro as workaround I use http://easyresapp.com/, when I set 1440x900 without retina - worked fine, with retina - slow

also checkbox "Enable 3D acceleration" and then turn the video memory - didn’t helped me - only disabling retina worked fine