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Sorry, I said "a VM" when I should have said "VirtualBox". VBox just has a suboptimal VESA implementation. And I overloaded non-accelerated into that for simplicity's sake.

Qemu shows that VESA/SVGA drivers can perform decently, the VBox team just hasn't prioritized making them do so. But the point stands that a non-accelerated video option will perform worse than an accelerated one for all VMs for anything but the simplest of blitting pipelines.

What do you mean? The VBox VESA BIOS is buggy? (There's not much else in a "VESA implementation") I really don't think that's the case. It is a bit slower than VMware, but never felt ridiculously so. And definitely qemu feels slower, and IMHO has a much worse and less compatible implementation (yes, the VBox BIOS forks from qemu, but at a point where qemu cared a bit more about retro-compatibility than nowadays). At worst I'd argue they are practically the same implementation.

But the point stands that a non-accelerated video option will perform worse than an accelerated one for all VMs for anything but the simplest of blitting pipelines.

That's why I put the example that Haiku on a completely not accelerated framebuffer performs miles better than Windows 11 on an accelerated 2 year old GPU. The GUI parts only, of course. Try it. It's just insane difference. And yes I do have 5k screens..

For 9x, even if it actually supported 2D acceleration, newer cards seem to do a terrible job at it.

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