Do you think I could get good performance playing old games on a Windows XP VM? Or should I consider dual booting? Some older games just don't work with Windows 10.
UPDATE: tried playing need for speed Porsche unleashed on an XP VM. Slightly laggy but definitely playable.
This game doesn't run at all on newer Windows. http://imgur.com/PMWcgA8
specs of real PC (laptop):
-i5 CPU (4 logical cores)
-AMD 5800 series HW graphics
-8 GB ddr3 RAM
-500 GB hard drives (2 physical drives)
-Windows 10 64 bit
Specs I allowed the VM (VMWare):
-2 logical CPU cores
-40 GB hard drive
-Windows XP pro 32 bit
-1.5 GB RAM
-512 MB video memory allowed, appears to be using a VMWare virtual graphics card.
Another real pc I may run it on (desktop):
-AMD FX-6300 CPU (6 cores, 3.5 ghz)
-AMD 7950 GPU (3 GB)
-12 GB ddr3 RAM
-1 TB hard drive
-Win 10 64 bit
any suggestions?
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[–] SkepticalMartian ago (edited ago)
The problem with virtualization is that unless your hardware directly supports it, you can't dedicate physical video hardware to a virtual machine. This means that the VM will use emulation for video which is often bad from a performance perspective. This may or may not matter depending on the game. Software emulation may be fast enough depending on the title.
If your mainboard and CPU both support hardware virtualization you can install a second video card and dedicate it to the VM. Here is an example of a Linux host operating system running a windows virtual machine with hardware virtualization and two video cards, one of which is dedicated to windows while the VM is running. Performance is quite good, and both the Windows and the Linux displays can be hardware accelerated at the same time.
On intel processors, you can check if you have virtualization technology by downloading the cpu identification tool. Once installed and run, you can check under the "CPU Technologies" tab. If you see Virtualization Technology and VT-x Extended Page Tables as supported, your CPU has support. In supported mainboards, your BIOS will have a setting to toggle virtualization support. My old intel i7 920 supports this quite nicely, and many other modern CPUs in the last 5 years should too.
AMD has a similar technology called AMD-V, but you'll need a different tool to test for support. I don't have any AMDs here to test it with, but the information is definitely out there.