virtualbox.org

Hey all,

I'm an avid VirtualBox user, and regularly use it to spin up Linux VMs for various development projects. With the coronavirus lockdown, I was also thinking maybe I could play boardgames over the internet using a similar setup (having got used to not really "polluting" the host system with software) to socialise with friends. I'm not a big 'gamer' - in fact I've barely played computer games since I turned 18 - but strange times have called for strange measures ....

Anyway, I have ...

Physical system
Win10 Pro
Intel Xeon E5-2630 v2 (6 core, 12 logical cores, @2.6GHZ
32GB RAM
Nvidia Quadro K4200 graphics card

Usual VM setup
8192MB ram
4 processors
default paravirtualisation interface
nested paging enabled
128MB video memory using VMVSVA

This works absolutely fine with Ubuntu 18.04

Win 10 VM setup
8192MB ram
4 processors (PAE/NX enabled)
hyper-v paravirtualisation interface
nested paging enabled
256MB video memory using VBoxSVGA

The latter works fine with some games on Steam (Risk, Twilight Struggle), but Terraforming Mars is sluggish to say the least, with very high response times (like, seconds between a mouse click and the associated UI update; and very poor video playback). Looking at the specs for that game (OS: Windows 7 / Windows 8 / Windows 10; Processor: Dual Core 3.0 GHz; Memory: 4 GB RAM; Storage: 250 MB available space) - I can't see why that would have such problems. I've installed the guest additions, though not done anything with any settings since then.

Any ideas/thoughts would be much appreciated

More cores in a guest slows down the guest, due to extra scheduling requirements on the host. If you are not filling up all cores 100% of the time, then whatever threads your guest OS runs have to be scheduled into the host OS's time, and spreading threads around on 4 cores when they could easily fit in 2 cores slows down the threads. Most modern OS's, like your guests, happily enjoy 2 cores. Try 2 on the Windows 10.

Also, in the Windows 10 OS, try disabling Settings > Personalization > Colors > Transparency Effects.

Games will never run in a virtual machine as well as they run in a physical PC, to a great extent due to needing a real video card instead of the virtual card that virtualizers provide.

If I wanted to run games while not messing up my working host OS, I would clone my host to another drive and dual-boot or F#-key-change-boot-order, and run the games on the bare metal. Also take regular disk image backups, to undo bunged installations or interference.