Slow graphical performance: dragging windows in a Windows 10 guest feels much slower than on the host
Affected version
- Boxes version: 45.0
- Flatpak: No
- Operating system name and version: Fedora 39
Steps to reproduce
- Create/set up a Windows 10 guest VM as per this tutorial
- In the VM, install the Windows guest tools from Spice and then install the stable VirtIO drivers (in my case,
virtio-win-gt-x64.msi
) - Launch Windows' Calculator app (or any app) and drag it around, fast and slowly
Seen behavior
It's much easier to see with the naked eye, but even in a screencast you can see there is a difference in smoothness between the host (GNOME Shell 45.5 Wayland) and the guest when it comes to smoothness when dragging windows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhIXHIhcy6w
Dragging windows on the host is a pretty consistent 60 fps, whereas in the Windows guest it feels like 10-25 fps.
Expected behavior
In an ideal world, graphical performance would be better, closer to the host system's.
Sysprof performance profiles
Here is what I was able to capture with Sysprof 46 while doing the dragging of Calculator on the guest: GNOME_Boxes_45_dragging_Windows_Calculator_around.tar.xz
CPU usage:
Compositor/graphics marks: