Virtualization and gaming very slow on 1809

Hi,

I recently re-installed Windows on my laptop to get 1809 before Windows Update got it.

Everything is quite fast as before, but Linux Virtualbox VMs and all big games (GTAV, The Witcher 3, Far Cry 3) have unacceptable lag that makes them near unusable. VMs have a roughly one-second delay reacting to mouse input, and games have less than 10 FPS; in some situations they are so slow that I can't play at all. On 1803, I usually had near-instant reaction in VMs and between 30 and 60FPS in these games, with only thermal throttling coming up sometimes.

I have all the latest Windows updates, I tried with the Windows Update-supplied Nvidia drivers, then with those from GeForce Experience. Dell's SupportAssist fails to install the latest Intel Graphics drivers, but since Windows Update doesn't have these I suppose I have the version I'm supposed to have.

I have no idea in which direction to search so I don't know what information may be useful, hopefully someone will have an idea and ask if necessary.

I hate to ask an obvious question, but how much memory do you have on your system and how much did you allocate to the VMs that you're having problems with?

I have 16GB RAM and gave 2GB to my Ubuntu and Kubuntu VMs.

I reinstalled Windows and my VMs are fine.

Hi there

@kogjhp

I don't know about VBOX but I use VMWare a lot --- however there are similarities in how the VM's are set up.

First of all see if in any of the config files there's any way to enable any sort of 3-D and / or hardware acceleration -- these parameters are often in a config file rather than being able to set these from the typical Create VM wizard.

Next obviously ensure maximum CPU / VM available for the VM as well as sufficient RAM for the video driver -- sometimes the defaults are set much too low. Don't go bonkers with CPU cores allocated to the VM - 2 would probably be OK

Finally ensure all Disks are of highest quality --SSD's obviously the best. Personally I'd try also for purely Linux data to use "Physical drives" with Linux file systems on them rather than .vmdk type of files. So use SSD for the linux VM OS and if you have large data files e,g a load of multi-media etc allocate RAW physical Linux drives -- easy to format --simply as root do mkfs.xfs -f /dev.sdx (or mkfs.ext4 for ext4 file systems) etc. Then just attach those drives to the VM. You can still share this data easily with windows --just use SAMBA.

The reason for using RAW physical drives is that you can avoid "double I/O" and file conversions when using Windows as a host --especially as NTFS is an ageing file system probably nearing its sell by date. Linux file systems are much more robust, efficient and recoverable - logging is far superior these days.

Cheers
jimbo

So, I've just tried further and I had a false impression, my VMs are still laggy.

I've installed Ubuntu 18.10, gave it 4GB RAM, 4 CPU cores with 100% maximum load, 3D acceleration and the maximum amount of GPU memory, and of course the CPU's virtualization instructions are enabled.

Moving the mouse and typing are as fast as expected, but every part of the UI takes at least one second to react to anything, it's weird. Also, programs take too much time to load: the file explorer starts in 5 seconds for example.

I have a Core i7 from last year and a good SSD, so I'm not sure what's wrong.

@jimbo: I will try your suggestions later, thanks.

If I were at your place, I'd try to install the exact same set of drivers as in previous build. (The newest isn't necessary the best.) But the problem may lie in the new build itself; you always can restore system from some image of previous build.