Graphics Frame Rate Affected By Hyper-V

[QuantumTron]

EDIT: Disclaimer - I was NOT trying to run ED in a VM!

Here's an interesting one...

For various reasons I had activated Hyper-V on my Windows 8.1 system, which I use for software development as well as playing ED.

In actual fact, I had forgotten I'd activated it for ages - only being reminded when I couldn't run Virtualbox on that system where it had been working before.

At the same time, I had been suffering from a number of problems playing Elite: Dangerous, the two most annoying things were;

1) My dual-monitor picture were glitching whenever I used the Galaxy Map - it was most apparent whenever the galactic core was in view and/or when nebulas were in view, as soon as both were out of the current frame the glitching would stop.

2) The overall frame rate of the game was ranging from a maximum of 30FPS to as low as 9FPS.

As this machine has an AMD HD7950 in it, I was naturally a tad disappointed with the glitching and low frame rate. Remember, I'd forgotten Hyper-V was on at the time, and I was getting frustrated with the above when no amount of settings tweaking or downgrading graphics drivers helped.

So anyway - after I realised that Hyper-V was still on, I had a theory that running a Hypervisor was the culprit, for various technical reasons (plus I had extensive experience with running the Xen hypervisor when that was a new thing many years ago).

So I deactivated Hyper-V, and loaded up ED after the necessary reboot.

What. A. Difference!

Now I get frame rates of 60FPS as standard, very rarely dropping down to anything lower than about 30. The game looks and feels silky smooth now!

So if anyone suffers from severe glitching when the galaxy map is on, and/or suffers from unexpectedly low frame rates, make sure you don't have Hyper-V activated on your system. Try deactivating it and see if that makes a difference.

I'd be interested to learn if others have had that same experience - plus I'm sure this is a handy tidbit for the Devs to keep in mind as well.

 

[kamenjar]

Well duhh... Wouldn't virtualization severely impact gaming performance? Does Hyper-V even support PCI Passthrough?

 

[klorgas]

Well duhh... Wouldn't virtualization severely impact gaming performance? Does Hyper-V even support PCI Passthrough?

Pretty sure the OP is not running ED on a Virtual machine but just had it activated. Its an intresting find. I have hyper-v active but don't have a issue, what CPU do you have?

 

[kamenjar]

Pretty sure the OP is not running ED on a Virtual machine but just had it activated. Its an intresting find. I have hyper-v active but don't have a issue, what CPU do you have?

Hmm, My bad, I guess. I don't know how Hyper-V works obviously. I got VirtualBox and there's nothing to "enable". You either run a guest or you don't. Don't see any way how it could impact the performance of anything. I can even run another Guest while playing a game and I don't see anything special.

Microsoft is Microsoft - Stay away!

 

[QuantumTron]

Pretty sure the OP is not running ED on a Virtual machine but just had it activated. Its an intresting find. I have hyper-v active but don't have a issue, what CPU do you have?

AMD Phenom X4, 16GB RAM.

And yes you're correct - I was merely saying I had Hyper-V activated - not trying to run ED in a VM - that would have been insane

 

[QuantumTron]

Hmm, My bad, I guess. I don't know how Hyper-V works obviously. I got VirtualBox and there's nothing to "enable". You either run a guest or you don't. Don't see any way how it could impact the performance of anything. I can even run another Guest while playing a game and I don't see anything special.

Microsoft is Microsoft - Stay away!

If you look up Hyper-V in Wikipedia (inb4 citing Wikipedia == bad), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-V , and have a look at the architectural diagram...

View attachment 7496

You'll see that having hyper-v activated adds a number of "layers" of Stuff between the native hardware and the software you run. ED in my case was running in the so-called Parent Partition, and thus supposedly had full access to the hardware. However as I wrote in my original post, the game was affected by having hyper-v activated, and benefits remarkably when it is deactivated.

I have quite a few years of experience dealing with virtual machines, also having written some technical articles on them, especially Virtualbox, which operates in a different manner to Hyper-V in fact.

 

[pargyrak]

HyperV does not support PCI passthrough and even VMware that has offered the option on ESXi for some hardware, it does not officially support it.

 

[QuantumTron]

HyperV does not support PCI passthrough and even VMware that has offered the option on ESXi for some hardware, it does not officially support it.

And nowhere in my OP did I state I was running ED within a VM, which perhaps if you had read the replies before replying yourself, you would have seen.

I am now going to edit my OP to add this disclaimer, thanks for letting me know I should.

 

[MJallday]

Here's an interesting one...

For various reasons I had activated Hyper-V on my Windows 8.1 system, which I use for software development as well as playing ED.

In actual fact, I had forgotten I'd activated it for ages - only being reminded when I couldn't run Virtualbox on that system where it had been working before.

At the same time, I had been suffering from a number of problems playing Elite: Dangerous, the two most annoying things were;

1) My dual-monitor picture were glitching whenever I used the Galaxy Map - it was most apparent whenever the galactic core was in view and/or when nebulas were in view, as soon as both were out of the current frame the glitching would stop.

2) The overall frame rate of the game was ranging from a maximum of 30FPS to as low as 9FPS.

As this machine has an AMD HD7950 in it, I was naturally a tad disappointed with the glitching and low frame rate. Remember, I'd forgotten Hyper-V was on at the time, and I was getting frustrated with the above when no amount of settings tweaking or downgrading graphics drivers helped.

So anyway - after I realised that Hyper-V was still on, I had a theory that running a Hypervisor was the culprit, for various technical reasons (plus I had extensive experience with running the Xen hypervisor when that was a new thing many years ago).

So I deactivated Hyper-V, and loaded up ED after the necessary reboot.

What. A. Difference!

Now I get frame rates of 60FPS as standard, very rarely dropping down to anything lower than about 30. The game looks and feels silky smooth now!

So if anyone suffers from severe glitching when the galaxy map is on, and/or suffers from unexpectedly low frame rates, make sure you don't have Hyper-V activated on your system. Try deactivating it and see if that makes a difference.

I'd be interested to learn if others have had that same experience - plus I'm sure this is a handy tidbit for the Devs to keep in mind as well.

I have a 7950 running on an i5 with 32gb ram. I average between 200-300fps (peaking at 500) - and ive never seen it lower than 49) - but then again my machine is streamlined for elite
but I would absolutely be turning off hyper v

I use hyperv extensively in my work environments, I can tell you its incredibly resource hungry (even more so when you have vms on) . it also tends to segment memory and processor calls off if not setup properly (even if nothing running) - so its no wonder that your experiencing difficulties. ive also never tried running it on any other OS apart form dedicated windows server, so im not sure how nicely its playing with 8.1 (I run it in several clusters on 2008 r2 and 2012 r2) - im sure it works, but my view is that if you've got a gaming pc, then you probably shouldn't be running hyper v on it as well (or at least disabling the vmm and hyper v services!)

 

[QuantumTron]

I have a 7950 running on an i5 with 32gb ram. I average between 200-300fps (peaking at 500) - and ive never seen it lower than 49) - but then again my machine is streamlined for elite
but I would absolutely be turning off hyper v

I use hyperv extensively in my work environments, I can tell you its incredibly resource hungry (even more so when you have vms on) . it also tends to segment memory and processor calls off if not setup properly (even if nothing running) - so its no wonder that your experiencing difficulties. ive also never tried running it on any other OS apart form dedicated windows server, so im not sure how nicely its playing with 8.1 (I run it in several clusters on 2008 r2 and 2012 r2) - im sure it works, but my view is that if you've got a gaming pc, then you probably shouldn't be running hyper v on it as well (or at least disabling the vmm and hyper v services!)

Totally agree with you on all points

My system isn't a dedicated gaming system at all, just a generic box that I built myself to have a semi-decent spec. In fact, 95% of the time it's booted into Linux where I've historically performed all my work, and Windows was always treated as "The Gaming OS" and "The Music Making OS". I had an old copy of some music creation software lying around that wouldn't run on W8.1, then on googling around found that it would run when Hyper-V was activated, and that's the main reason I had for doing so. Then I simply forgot I'd done that and when I realised my ED woes could be caused by running the hypervisor and it turned out this was the case, I thought I would mention it on the forums as a heads-up for those who might also be having this exact same problem

EDIT: BONUS! When I saw the framerates you were getting on your 7950, I just now checked my graphics settings again and saw that before deactivating hyper-v I had limited the framerate to 60FPS in my earlier attempts to get a smoother experience. Derp. Switched that off just now and now getting even better FPS. Whodathunk?

 

[pargyrak]

And nowhere in my OP did I state I was running ED within a VM, which perhaps if you had read the replies before replying yourself, you would have seen.

I am now going to edit my OP to add this disclaimer, thanks for letting me know I should.

I know, I just replied to another forum member that wrote about PCI passthrough. Playing games on VM is still not advisable unless you play the original Elite

 

[QuantumTron]

I know, I just replied to another forum member that wrote about PCI passthrough. Playing games on VM is still not advisable unless you play the original Elite

Indeed, trying to play games in VM is not advisable

Note though that I was playing ED in the Parent Partition, not in a VM I just totally forgot I'd activated HYPER-V ages ago, is all

 

[pargyrak]

Indeed, trying to play games in VM is not advisable

Note though that I was playing ED in the Parent Partition, not in a VM I just totally forgot I'd activated HYPER-V ages ago, is all

Need to check also if I have HyperV activated also on my gaming laptop. I was using it as a HyperV test environment so it might still be active. Iam getting decent FPS but I can always use the extra power

 

[Shintai]

AMD Phenom X4, 16GB RAM.

And yes you're correct - I was merely saying I had Hyper-V activated - not trying to run ED in a VM - that would have been insane

Your old CPU simply dies with too much context switching. Its a bad CPU to begin with for virtualization. Its also why features such as EPT is so important. (Nehalem and up.) But even that is outdated today.