Big_Al wrote:

90% of that is over my head. And I don't have Virtual Box. VMware Player as stated in the OP.

Get the benchmark

http://web.archive.org/web/200710261...pi_mod-1.5.zip

Try it inside the VM environment.
Try it outside the VM environment.

The VM environment runs at about 90% of the speed
of native execution, which makes room for some
instruction emulation calls. Most of the guest OS
instructions, execute without interference. But
some must be trapped, and emulated. So the guest
cannot go at 100% speed. Doing a simple minded
benchmark like SuperPI, is a simple way to assure
yourself that things are working as expected.

Only if the results weren't even close (the run time
in the VM is ten times slower than the host), would you
assume there is some problem.

*******

If the OS running inside the virtual machine
does not get the graphics hardware support it
wants, it uses software rendering. This makes
OSes like Ubuntu, dog slow. It's not the OS
which is slow, it's the desktop GUI which takes
forever to finish. When the OS issues a graphics
call that is supposed to run in hardware, a lengthy
software routine takes its place.

This is why, you want a virtual machine environment
with 3D support (directx2d/directx3d). As an example,
VPC2007 or Windows Virtual PC hosting softwares
don't have hardware graphics acceleration, so every
OS with hardware acceleration needs, will behave poorly.

I don't know whether VMWare has graphics support. VirtualBox
does have it. VirtualBox graphics support is labeled
as "experimental support", meaning they implemented enough
of it to keep a few things happy.

There are various levels of graphics support

1) Frame buffer emulation. This is the least amount of
work you can do. VPC2007 does this. It emulates an
S3 video card. The guest OS writes to the frame buffer,
and the writes end up redirected to the host frame buffer
in some way. No other graphics operations are supported.
No programmable shaders. No game support. You can't
play Crysis in the guest machine.

2) Partial support for an API. VirtualBox supports some
portion of DirectX 2D and DirectX 3D calls. I don't
know exactly how it does this. Maybe the odd game
(like Crysis), could be run in the Guest OS.

3) Full support. Hyper-V (available in Win8, with a CPU
that supports SLAT/EPT), should be able to pass more
of the guest graphics calls directly to the hardware.
I understand it's a bit slow.

The best implementation I've run into, was how
a graphics card was handled on the Macintosh.
Back in the day, the Mac had a basic frame buffer
card, and using VGA connectors for passthru, you
could add a "gamer" card so 3D games would work.
It was the fact there were two cards, allowing
one card to be owned by the host, and the other
card by the guest, that makes this possible (cleanly).

CPU --- frame_buffer_card --- 3DFX_card --- computer_monitor
VGA VGA

One of the commercial virtual machine softwares
there, gave the "gamer" card entirely to the guest.
So the guest had full control, and the game image
was an overlay (wrote over top of) the regular screen.
So that idea violates the "insulation" aspects of
virtual machines, but it does allow graphics acceleration
to work properly. I think I played Quake II on that thing,
at 1 FPS (frame per second). It was like a slide show. And
that was the fault of the pitiful processor and the X86
to PowerPC instruction conversion. Your VMWare on the
other hand, is X86 on X86, so runs at full speed
(90% performance level).

*******

If you find VMWare sucks, try VirtualBox (Oracle/Sun).

Good luck,
Paul