title: Can GPU capabilities impact virtual machine performance?
body: <p>While this many not seem like a programming question directly, it impacts my development activities and so it seems like it belongs here.</p>
  
  <p>It seems that more and more developers are turning to virtual environments for development activities on their computers, SharePoint development being a prime example.  Also, as a trainer, I have virtual training environments for all of the classes that I teach.</p>
  
  <p>I recently purchased a new Dell E6510 to travel around with. It has the i7 620M (Dual core, HyperThreaded cpu running at 2.66GHz) and 8 GB of memory.  Reading the spec sheet, it sounded like it would be a great laptop to carry around and run virtual machines on.</p>
  
  <p>Getting the laptop though, I've been pretty disappointed with the user experience of developing in a virtual machine.  Giving the Virtual Machine 4 GB of memory, it was slow and I could type complete sentences and watch the VM "catchup".</p>
  
  <p>My company has training laptops that we provide for our classes. They are Dell Precision M6400 Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 running at 2.54Ghz with 8 GB of memory and the experience on these laptops is night and day compared to the E6510. They are crisp and you are barely aware that you are running in a virtual environment. </p>
  
  <p>Since the E6510 should be faster in all categories than the M6400, I couldn't understand why the new laptop was slower, so I did a component by component comparison and the only place where the E6510 is less performant than the M6400 is the graphics department.  The M6400 is running a nVidia FX 2700m GPU and the E6510 is running a nVidia 3100M GPU. Looking at benchmarks of the two GPUs suggest that the FX 2700M is twice as fast as the 3100M.</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p><a href="http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html</a></p>
    
    <p>3100M = 111th (E6510)</p>
    
    <p>FX 2700m = 47th (Precision M6400)</p>
    
    <p>Radeon HD 5870 = 8th (Alienware)</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>The host OS is Windows 7 64bit as is the guest OS, running in Virtual Box 3.1.8 with Guest Additions installed on the guest. The IDE being used in the virtual environment is VS 2010 Premium.</p>
  
  <p>So after that long setup, my question is:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p><em>Is the GPU significantly impacting the virtual machine's performance or
    are there other factors that I'm not
    looking at that I can use to boost the
    vm's performance?  Do we now have to
    consider GPU performance when
    purchasing laptops where we expect to
    use virtualized development
    environments?</em></p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance.</p>
  
  <p>Cheers,
  Dave</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong></p>
  
  <p>The HDDs in the two systems are 7200 RPM, the E6510 having 500GB vs. the M6400 have 2x 250GB in a non-RAID configuration.</p>
  
  <p>Also, when I turn off some of the graphics features of Windows 7 (host and guest) by going to non-Aero themes, VM performance visibly increases.</p>