Windows 10 Hyper-V Impact on Gaming
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I have been wondering the same thing because there are some older games that I'd like to run but Windows 10 breaks the DRM and the game crashes or won't launch.
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@nadnerB said in Windows 10 Hyper-V Impact on Gaming:
I have been wondering the same thing because there are some older games that I'd like to run but Windows 10 breaks the DRM and the game crashes or won't launch.
This won't fix anything. This is still Windows 10, just with the extra overhead of Hyper-V.
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I've enabled Hyper-V on Win10 on my personal desktop computer before I put it away, and I noticed literally zero impact for gaming... and you're not really going to either.
The FPS stayed exactly the same.
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@scottalanmiller said in Windows 10 Hyper-V Impact on Gaming:
Obviously if guest VMs are running, that is noticeable. I mean when Hyper-V is enabled but no guests are running.
It's still not noticeable while gaming if you have sufficient RAM and CPU, unless you are using video memory via RemoteFX for your VMs, then yes it is noticeable.
Back when I did this I had a few VMs running for some labs when I was studying for the MCSE. I kept them running sometimes when I was gaming and FPS and responsiveness stayed the same.
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@Tim_G said in Windows 10 Hyper-V Impact on Gaming:
I've enabled Hyper-V on Win10 on my personal desktop computer before I put it away, and I noticed literally zero impact for gaming... and you're not really going to either.
The FPS stayed exactly the same.
Great, I plan to do this today then.
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@Tim_G said in Windows 10 Hyper-V Impact on Gaming:
@scottalanmiller said in Windows 10 Hyper-V Impact on Gaming:
Obviously if guest VMs are running, that is noticeable. I mean when Hyper-V is enabled but no guests are running.
It's still not noticeable while gaming if you have sufficient RAM and CPU, unless you are using video memory via RemoteFX for your VMs, then yes it is noticeable.
Back when I did this I had a few VMs running for some labs when I was studying for the MCSE. I kept them running sometimes when I was gaming and FPS and responsiveness stayed the same.
That's crazy. But with prioritization and enough overhead, no reason this wouldn't be true.
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Take a backup of the machine as is. Then, try. See what its like. Have fun!
If all goes tits up, restore the backup. -
No impact with hyper-v enabled on Windows 10 from what I could see.
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I recently read one of your posts on spiceworks and thus watched your video which explained how Hyper-V is a still a type 1 hypervisor even when installed as a role within the OS and how it then virtualizes the 'host OS' and transparently runs it within Hyper-V. Very interesting and enlightening.
This caused me to wonder about gaming on that OS. I had tried gaming in VMs on type 2 hypervisors before and found the performance awful or even completely unusable.
I have a spare win10 pro box that I mostly use for casual gaming or browsing, and had put hyper-V on it mostly to host a minecraft server to play around on with my nephew. It still works fine for minecraft, and other not too demanding games that I use on that box- I hadn't noticed a difference, but haven't bench-marked at all either.
My 'main' box is still Win7 and I have recently put a decent-ish video card in it (GTX1060) for games. I do run a few testing VMs on it in Virtualbox. I have considered upgrading it to 10 and doing the VMs in Hyper-V and upon learning that this would virtualize my host OS, I wondered how much of a penalty I would suffer, or if it would be unfeasible.
Web Searching this topic lead me to this post on your blog. So, your spiceworks post lead me to your video, which lead to a question, which lead to a search, which lead to your blog, haha!
Other search results on the question varied wildly. From some saying negligible effect, to some claiming frame-rates of like 80% less.
I would be very interested to read how your testing of the matter went.
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@dukeofkanabec said in Windows 10 Hyper-V Impact on Gaming:
I recently read one of your posts on spiceworks and thus watched your video which explained how Hyper-V is a still a type 1 hypervisor even when installed as a role within the OS and how it then virtualizes the 'host OS' and transparently runs it within Hyper-V. Very interesting and enlightening.
This caused me to wonder about gaming on that OS. I had tried gaming in VMs on type 2 hypervisors before and found the performance awful or even completely unusable.
I have a spare win10 pro box that I mostly use for casual gaming or browsing, and had put hyper-V on it mostly to host a minecraft server to play around on with my nephew. It still works fine for minecraft, and other not too demanding games that I use on that box- I hadn't noticed a difference, but haven't bench-marked at all either.
My 'main' box is still Win7 and I have recently put a decent-ish video card in it (GTX1060) for games. I do run a few testing VMs on it in Virtualbox. I have considered upgrading it to 10 and doing the VMs in Hyper-V and upon learning that this would virtualize my host OS, I wondered how much of a penalty I would suffer, or if it would be unfeasible.
Web Searching this topic lead me to this post on your blog. So, your spiceworks post lead me to your video, which lead to a question, which lead to a search, which lead to your blog, haha!
Other search results on the question varied wildly. From some saying negligible effect, to some claiming frame-rates of like 80% less.
I would be very interested to read how your testing of the matter went.
I am sure that @scottalanmiller will answer you back. This week has been our MangoCon 2017 conference week. Everyone is taking naps and recovering from last night before we jump into tonight!
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@dukeofkanabec If you are not using any VMs the part of enabling Windows 10 will not have many effects if any on the main OS with the role installed. Once you have the OS and VMs running at the same time that's where performance might be affected.
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instead of virtual drivers talking to the GPU, why you dont want to consider GPU pass-through ? and dedicate it to specific VM. going this route you can choose any modern hypervisor
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@emad-r said in Windows 10 Hyper-V Impact on Gaming:
instead of virtual drivers talking to the GPU, why you dont want to consider GPU pass-through ? and dedicate it to specific VM. going this route you can choose any modern hypervisor
It's an existing Windows box that only needs to run Steam 99% of the time. Was only looking to get a little additional visualization use out of it on rare occasion for testing use. Installing any other hypervisor or moving the Windows workload to a VM would be very cumbersome. It's 2TB in size.
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Realize this post is old, but just want to clear up some possible confusion you may have about Hyper-V. Adding the Hyper-V role on a Windows 10 system will not make the host OS a child role. The Win10 system will now act as the parent role which is a VM that has direct access to hardware in contrast to child roles that accesses virtualised hardware - the two are not the same or interchangeable. Therefore, no gaming performance hit should even be noticable on that level. The shared performance on CPU/RAM/Disk is an issue you'd have to evaluate and prioritize though.
Point is, the parent OS has direct hardware access, not virtualized. It's not a child VM like the ones you create afterwards. Microsoft documents this well.
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@osva said in Windows 10 Hyper-V Impact on Gaming:
Point is, the parent OS has direct hardware access, not virtualized. It's not a child VM like the ones you create afterwards. Microsoft documents this well.
It may have direct access, but it is absolutely virtualized. Direct access is not the same as not being virtualized. There is no question that it is virtual. It has to be or Hyper-V can't be there.
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@osva said in Windows 10 Hyper-V Impact on Gaming:
Realize this post is old, but just want to clear up some possible confusion you may have about Hyper-V. Adding the Hyper-V role on a Windows 10 system will not make the host OS a child role. The Win10 system will now act as the parent role which is a VM that has direct access to hardware in contrast to child roles that accesses virtualised hardware - the two are not the same or interchangeable. Therefore, no gaming performance hit should even be noticable on that level. The shared performance on CPU/RAM/Disk is an issue you'd have to evaluate and prioritize though.
Point is, the parent OS has direct hardware access, not virtualized. It's not a child VM like the ones you create afterwards. Microsoft documents this well.
First you have the hardware...
then you have the hypervisor that sits directly on top of that and has direct access to the hardware. This is ring -1. (minus one)
Then you have Ring 0 where the VSP / VM BUS / Drivers sit.
Now, here's where you have Ring 3, which is where the management OS AND the child partitions sit..
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But definitely, that it is the parent VM (Dom0 as old timers call it) and not a child VM (DomU) is important for performance. It has priority.
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The child partitions communicate directly with the hypervisor in modern operating systems. In Windows XP or VMs without Hyper-V Tools for example, they go through the "management OS".
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@obsolesce It's called paravirtualization. And Xen has done it since the 1990s
Only Xen could do it for the entire VM, not just the drivers.
