[Spice-devel] unwatchable choppy performance using fullscreen flash in windows VM

[Greg Sheremeta]

Hey all,

Using a high-end Fedora 20 host, I get very poor choppy performance running flash full-screen
in a Windows VM. I need to use Windows due to DRM stuff (nflsundayticket.tv). I've tried
different virtual graphics adapters, but nothing helps. Attempting 1920x1080. Flash 15.
Using remote-viewer or virt-manager, spice, QXL is set to 64 MB RAM.

Some googling suggests that QXL just can't handle 1920x1080 flash fullscreen.

Using VirtualBox gives pretty flawless performance at 1920x1080. But I want to use
virt-manager / virt-viewer and KVM, of course :)

I've also had success using VLC to stream the non-maximized flash player from the windows
guest to the host, and then VLC scales up on the host (using host hardware acceleration,
I think). But this is a bit of a pain to manage.

One option I've read about is passing through a graphics adapter. My host machine has
my primary nvidia card, but it also has the onboard Intel adapter that I don't use. Maybe
if I can pass this Intel card through, I'd get the performance I'm looking for. From what
I can tell, this isn't quite ready for primetime.

I know about the 64bit vram bar, but I haven't tried it for this. Would it help?

Any other ideas?

Thanks,
Greg

Greg Sheremeta
Red Hat, Inc.
Sr. Software Engineer, RHEV
Cell: 919-807-1086
gshereme at redhat.com