virtualbox.org

Hi,

I have recently ran into problems facing slow graphics and slow video playback on my Windows guests. For ex, when watching a video, the stream isn't fluid and is all choppy.
The same problem occurs on 2 different Windows 10 guests, and another Windows 7 guest.

My host is a Dell Latitude with i7 processor, 16GB RAM and SSD hard drive (VM's running on SSD), running Windows 10. Virtualbox is latest version 5.1.16 (guest additions are updated on guests). I also have the updated extension pack installed.

I have tested several different settings on my VM (as found in other older topics), such as:
- Set other Paravirtualization Interface such as Hyper-V
- Enable 3D Acceleration (Log says host doesn't support)
- Increase video memory to 256MB (currently set at 128MB).
- Set SSD on the Storage configuration
- Disable Audio
- Disable Anti-Virus software (Avast)

The weird thing is, IT USED TO WORK CORRECTLY.
I noticed it stopped working correctly when I ran into some problems with networking (Bridged networking didn't work), so I restored a full backup from my host OS, and then updated VirtualBox to the latest version.
There were no other significant changes on the host that I remember (some new softwares installed over time, but no changes in drivers, etc.).

I have attached the current logs.
Any clue why this is happening? Anyone else with the same problem?

Cheers,
MA

When stuck in a mudpit, it's best not to thrash as that rarely improves matters. Only take measures when you have a sound reason for believing it will make things better - by which I mean that I don't see any connection between the problem you reported and the things you tried. Why would enabling trim (aka. tag drive as SSD) improve graphics performance?

I would: (a) enable 3D acceleration (*), (b) bring the GAs up to date, (c) eject the GAs CD which is still in the virtual drive, (d) check the guest and host tasklists for CPU or I/O hogs, since mysterious slowdowns on Windows PCs are IME nearly always caused by Windows Update.

That all said, your PC seems to be a strange beast: oodles of RAM, but only two cores. That means that official advice is only to give 1 core to the VM, and a Win10 VM is IMHO never going to do well with 1 core.

(*) Any modern PC should support 3D acceleration. I would check for graphics driver fixes for your host. Or, investigate getting a new graphics card.

Tested recommended settings and managed to get 3D acceleration working (also set video memory to 256MB), but still get laggy video playback.
Only thing left is Windows updates, which I know they were also applied recently. However, I won't be messing with windows Updates for now. When I get a chance, I'll boot from a clean HDD and test on a clean Windows host OS to check if it's my current Windows OS causing this issue.
Thanks for the tips nonetheless..
Cheers

Does your host also have Avast (a recent version) ?

PSolPT wrote: Only thing left is Windows updates, which I know they were also applied recently.

I did not intend to suggest that an update caused the problem. What I'm saying is that the Windows Update process itself is a notorious bandwidth hog - both CPU and network.

I don't have very fast internet here at home, so when my physical PC suddenly shows a mysterious slowness the first thing I check is whether Windows is downloading updates. And I often find that the answer is yes.

To add another "degree of freedom" to the problem, if you're watching videos online, the latest trend is to move everything to HTML5 instead of Flash-based videos. The problem is that HTML5 is taxiing the system way more compared to Flash. On my physical system I have add-ons/extensions in Firefox that prevent HTML5 and present the alternative Flash-based videos, just because of better performance.

I can't say I've noticed a big performance hit with HTML5, I assume that would depend on the implementation. My problem with flash is that it's proprietary, and I often have problems with it on non-Windows platforms. There have also of course been the well publicised security holes and reliability issues, leading to Mozilla/FIrefox deprecating its use.

mpack wrote:I can't say I've noticed a big performance hit with HTML5, I assume that would depend on the implementation.

I wouldn't say "big" (actually I did say that ), but enough to make my fans kick in a notch higher, like from 10% to 20-30% in full screen. On both an OSX and a Win7 host. On the other hand there's the famous Apple iP* devices that dropped Flash because of energy concerns. 6 of these, 1/2 dozen of those...

mpack wrote:There have also of course been the well publicised security holes and reliability issues, leading to Mozilla/FIrefox to deprecate its use.

Oh, definitely, no question about it! But in Firefox 52 (the latest as of this writing), they killed every plugin. Except Flash. Popularity I guess... And I'm not sure if they're planning to migrate from an NPAPI plugin style to a PPAPI one: http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/

Slow graphics are noticeable even when navigating through Windows. As far as the video playback goes, it's local files (.avi , .mpg , etc.), including mobile recorded videos.
I recently upgraded to the latest virtualbox package 5.1.18, and even created a whole new VM, but issue still persists. As far as I can tell, it must be something related to my host OS. Next step will be to try switching the host's HDD and try with a different (clean) host OS.

The VM is single core and no GPU, so naturally you're going to notice a lag when playing mpegs as all the decoding and rendering is happening on the same core as the rest of your Win10 guest OS.