this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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What's the graphics performance like these day compared to VMware and Virtual Box?
Much better compared to Virtual box as it is a hyper II hypervisor vs a type I
You will have almost no overhead with KVM. Performance impact is 1-2% depending on hardware.
KVM isn't a Type I. VMware and virtual box aren't strictly Type II either. They all use kernel modules and hardware assisted virtualization. So it would all be considered kernel based virtualization. People talking using these terms is normally a sign that they haven't kept up with modern virtualization technology.
Also your confusing GPU performance with CPU performance. VMs don't typically use the real GPU, at least not directly. So it's about which has the best software. I know VMWare are known for having decent GPU emulation, though with VirGL KVM might take the win. Unfortunately VirGL doesn't work on Windows. After looking at it it seems VMWare is best for graphics. I am also wondering if I can do seamless mode on KVM. That's something both Virtual Box and VMWare can do.
KVM is indeed a type I hypervisor and will be the best performing. I think VMware uses KVM under the hood. As far as graphics goes it works fine.
Virtual box is slow and doesn't perform nearly as good as KVM because it isn't native. The benefit of Virtualbox is that it runs on anything. I also should point out that KVM can run as a Type II in some cases if hardware acceleration isn't present.
Are you speaking from recent personal experience? I run a lot of virtualization in both my homelab and my laptop. KVM runs very fast and has no slowness. I can play games in it (with some tweaks) and I rarely install anything locally. I use flatpaks, containers and VMs. Even when Windows 11 is running without 3D acceleration it still is snappy and smooth. You just need to install the Virtio drivers from the Fedora project. If you don't you can't copy and paste and the performance is degraded. I am saying this all from personal experience. I have seen a lot of people call KVM a type II which is simply not true in most cases. At the end of the day it is a grey area but KVM is pretty much what powers the cloud. It is what AWS and other public cloud providers use.
If you read the Wikipedia entry for virtual box you can see it hasn't supported software virtualization since version 6.1, and it had hardware virtualization support long before then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualBox
I am not saying it's equally as fast, but it's a myth that it doesn't give direct access to the CPU, and it's one I see repeated a fair bit.