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Comment by andrewmackrodt | Hacker News Reader

If anyone tries running Photoshop under Windows using this and has good performance please tag me in a comment. I've migrated several times from Qemu, VirtualBox and settled on VMware player (for non commercial usage).

I found that to be the "best" performing, although still leaves a lot to be desired and having to open the application, manually sign kernel drivers and then reboot after every kernel upgrade is a little tiresome.

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Are you passing in a second GPU to the VM using VFIO? Otherwise I don't believe graphics will be accelerated.

Sadly no, my Ryzen doesn't have an iGPU and I only have the one dedicated GPU. VMware's software? acceleration is partially useful however, there are some bugs requiring disabling transparency in Windows but various Direct X programs run mostly acceptably. I find it the best performing of the 3 setups when using GPU passthrough is not available.

The first problem is rendering within the guest. If you only have one GPU, then GVT-g [1] virtualizes it with just a bit of overhead. But it's Intel only.

The second problem is getting those pixels onto your screen in the host. SPICE is not as fast as Looking Glass [2], which sets up a shared memory buffer between the host and guest. This has acceptable performance even for modern games.

The OP doesn't seem to utilize these techniques, so I don't think it can plausibly claim to have the fastest configuration - at least not yet.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_GVT-g

[2] https://looking-glass.io

Thanks! TIL [1,2]

If this is a desktop, just get a cheap & basic PCI-e card with DVI output to use for your host and pass through your actual GPU to the guest.

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