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I am interested in using a VM for my day to day tasks for various reasons. However there is one issue that I have noticed : Graphics support.

On a decently powerful laptop running Windows 7 I did some testing with Fedora 15 and Ubuntu 11.04. No matter what I tried, the interface was very laggy almost to the point of unusable. Since it was only for testing I didn't really care but since I'm interested in day to day use this is an issue. I can only image how unusable Windows 7 would of been.

Is there any VM software that has good graphics support? I was thinking of having the host OS be something lite like Debian, so keep that in mind.

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How much RAM did you assign to the guest OS? – bbaja42 Jun 18 '11 at 18:43
Why the downvote? – TheLQ Jun 18 '11 at 18:56
@bbaja42 Most likely most of the available ram with only a little bit for the host OS – TheLQ Jun 18 '11 at 18:57

1 Answer

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Well, I use VirtualBox, with Arch Linux and OSX as guests, and the GUI isn't that laggy. It won't be playing games anytime soon, but it works just fine for other stuff.

Also, define "decently powerful". The graphics speed in the guest OS depends a lot on the specs of the host.

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+1, exactly what I was thinking – Mehrdad Jun 18 '11 at 18:47
Whats the host OS your using? And doesn't any VM software hide the real video card preventing it from accelerating? – TheLQ Jun 18 '11 at 18:58
Not necessarily. It hides direct access, but it can still proxy DirectX or OpenGL commands, providing for some acceleration. – Darth Android Jun 18 '11 at 21:20
I've used both Windows and Linux for the host, with the same VM. I've also enabled 3d graphics acceleration for the guest OS, which could change the performance. – Eli Jun 18 '11 at 23:48

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