So I am pretty committed to using unraid as my primary app/file server for my home.

I converted my daily driver desktop/plex media server into an unraid system

I have all my apps and everything configured the way I want for the most part.

The VM other than audio issues in another thread works fine for standard stuff, but gaming performance is absolutely atrocious.

 

Here is my hardware

AMD 970 chipset

8 core 3.5 ghz processor

dual HD 6770 graphics cards

16gig of ram.

 

I created a windows 10 VM with 4 cores, 8 gb of ram, passing through both video cards, which appears to be working fine

Loaded into Heroes of the Storm, and it was terrible.  I do not have frame rate numbers, but there was some sort of crazy lag it was just bad bad bad.

 

Is there a good guide on how to setup a VM for this use case.  HOTS is a game i had no issue with running when this was a stand alone windows 10 machine.  I would certainly hope i could replicate that to some degree.

 

Please let me know any info you need and so on.  You see all this stuff from Linus showing great gaming performance, but in his videos he is obviously not getting into some of the details to get this setup properly.

cpu pinning

cpu isolation from unRaid

 

that's a place to start. as I mentioned in the other tread.

 

You posted your cpu assignments, but did not mention cpu isolation, nor did you post the thread parings for your server, which makes it difficult to advise you any further as to the basics that you should be covering first.

 

just a guess is that you have your vm setup running on the same cores as unraid processes/dockers/etc, which causes issues for some people.

 

read the cpu pinning thread at the top of this forum. it will discuss isolation, thread pairings, and emulator pins to help improve vm performance.

I will read through that again, but my CPU does is an AMD, there is no hyper threading, so each core is a real core, not just a thread on a physical core.

 

Also other threads I have read suggested turning off cpu isolation to improve performance.  There seems to be alot of mixed information out there.

 

As I said in my other post.  My VM has cores 4,5,6,7 assigned to it.

0,1,2,3 are not assigned to anything in particular to my knowledge.

 

Is there some other information you need?  If so please tell me what, and where to find it I will happily provide it.

may be stuck then in that respect....

 

I've only used intel cpus....

 

your vm will only perform better if the cores it use are not being used by anything else. I don't see how anything to the contrary could be true though I'm open to evidence and explanation. Have you tried isolating the cpu cores? if you have core "pairs"

 

what is the model of your processor and how is it presented in the dash board (screenshot?)

Here is the screenshot

 

another bulldozer core... modules.... fun.... (twice in one day...)

 

this is assuming that uraid has your "thread" pairings as 0,1  2,3  4,5  6,7

 

ok, we can try this:

 

isolate 4,5,6,7 from unRaid via syslinux.cfg, you can access this on the main tab, scroll down a little and click flash.

 

then make the following changes

 

label unRAID OS
  menu default
  kernel /bzimage
append isolcpus=4,5,6,7 initrd=/bzroot

 

reboot. This will isolate cores from unraid.

 

then make sure you have those cores assigned to your vm. boot the vm. run your game. while running the one that is being bad, look on the unraid dashboard and see what cpu utilization looks like under system stats.

 

 

we're only giving it half the cpu power it had before since you said you were running other apps which is why we left 4 cores for unraid and those (i dont know what those apps are, but I assume 1 is plex)