I’ve been experimenting with VMware workstation as a way of running an HTPC in a VM instead of it taking the form of a seperate set top box. Primarily the reason for this is a few cables is a lot cheaper and a much simpler installation than an HTPC plus it gives me a good reason to experiment with virtualization which has been much more fun than I thought it’d be.
This setup should also (in theory) offer vastly more performance than what any reasonably priced HTPC would be capable of.
There are a few minor hiccups though. Video playback is often choppy with frame drops occuring randomly and some DX11 games have issues with stuttering.
The video playback performance I’m guessing comes down to the way VMware workstation 16 interacts with hardware accelerated decoding of HEVC files though I’m unsure on this and would like to hear from others who’ve had problems with choppy video rendering in any of VMware’s products and how you solved those issues.
The intermittent stuttering that occurs in games I initially thought was due to storage performance and so reinstalled the offending title (ori and the will of the wisps) on a SATA SSD seperate from the VM and host OS but the issue persists. I still suspect storage is the culprit since the stuttering only occurs during transitions between stages but am not sure how to confirm what exactly is the bottleneck.
Other than the above this solution works wonderfully and really hope I’m able to iron out these issues. Until Nvidia figure out what fools like me are up to and nuke support for VMware this has the potential of being far superior to a living room PC.
Found the issue. Had a dying HDD and the drive head was spazzing out every few seconds, causing stutter every time. Don’t know it was doing a slalom to avoid bad sectors or if it was constantly trying to read a bad sector only to time out and start over again but the issue was dealt with by just getting rid of the afflicted drive.