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XPS 15-9560, awful video performance at 3840x2160 in VM
Hi,
I have the XPS 15-9560 with the dual graphics card Nvidia GTX 1050 + Intel 630.
I use this machine as my workstation. I'm always working in a virtual machine (Hyper V).
Anyway, I've found the graphics performance is truly awful inside the VM if the host resolution is set to 4k (3840x2160). Just typing in the URL bar of the browser is lagging and slow. Turn it down to 1920x1080 in the host and everything is fine. NB: Typing in the browser address bar is fine at 4k on the host (just not in the VM). Any ideas?
jphughan
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November 12th, 2018 08:00
Client Hyper-V (the one included with non-Server versions of Windows) doesn't offer any support for providing GPU acceleration to VMs, although even the Server versions have some pretty strict requirements for enabling that, so the hardware might not meet those requirements anyway. I suspect that 4K resolution is simply a lot of resolution to deal with through emulation. Are you using Hyper-V's "Enhanced Session Mode"? It requires the guest OS to be Windows 8 or newer and essentially uses RDP technology to display the guest console, which might give you better performance.
eddiewould
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November 12th, 2018 14:00
Hey,
Yep I am using the enhanced session mode. I didn't mention it, but I've seen the same behaviour with VMWare & VirtualBox too.
I'd happily switch down to 1920x1080 however I start seeing visual artifacts when I do that (blurry fonts etc).
I'm wondering if there is some graphics card setting I'm missing (e.g. force the host to use the GTX1050 rather than the Intel 630). I do note that the GTX1050 doesn't support RemoteFX (the 630 does, but enabling it doesn't really make any difference).
jphughan
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November 12th, 2018 16:00
Are you using any external displays at the same time? If not, did you make sure log off and back on after dropping to 1920x1080 so that Windows internally starts rendering for a 100% scale factor rather than 200%? If you just change your resolution significantly enough to warrant a scale factor change and don't log off and back on, you'll see blurriness because Windows will still be rendering internally at the original scale factor and using GPU scaling to resize the rendered image. 1920x1080 with a 100% scale factor when Windows is actually using that should look basically perfect on a 4K display since it's exactly half the horizontal and vertical resolution, so the signal received by the display should map onto its physical pixels just fine.
Other than that, I don't know of a setting to force the NVIDIA GPU to be used all the time, or even how to force it to be used for guest VMs.