Newbie to QEMU (and emulation in general here)! I would like to know which is the most powerful graphics card (driver) QEMU can emulate. I've seen some options in the Gentoo wiki here: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/QEMU/Options#Graphics_card but there is no info about which one is the most powerful.

Also, I know that the most powerful method is gpu pass-through so I guess, I'm searching for the second most powerful depending on how you see it. Any ideas?

Edit: Just to be clear. I'm not asking for the driver that comes close to bare metal performance. I'm asking for the most powerful driver BETWEEN them.

Emulated graphics could never be described as powerful, more like passable..

Not sure how many software video drivers qemu has, maybe 5 or so.
None of them were new last time I looked, maybe now.

Yep, hard to get any virtual video to come close to physical.

Modern VM's can integrate with some physical hardware quite closely if you select well.

I would have said that was already clear, but apparently not. :/


The Arch wiki has more details than the Gentoo one: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/QEMU#Graphic_card
There's also this page with a few more snippets: https://computernewb.com/wiki/QEMU/Devices/Video_cards

My brief reading of those pages suggests that "std" will just work, but "qxl" has potential for higher performance for 2D, if supported and configured appropriately.

For improved 3D support on Linux-based OSes, "virtio" may perform better, and "vmware" might be a better choice for some/all versions of Windows.

There's probably people that have done benchmarks - a quick search revealed the following partly-related article, though I'm sure there's more out there if one were to go looking...
https://czak.pl/2020/04/09/three-levels-of-qemu-graphics.html

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Your question has raised only confusion. What do you mean by "powerful" in this context?
Are you looking for speed, resolution, or something else?
For a virtual guest that is at the mercy of the host hardware and software, "powerful" is a bit of a slippery concept if it can be found at all. We need to know what you are really looking for.

Thank you! This info will be enough to solve my question! Have a great day my friend!

Edit: A also forgot to add that "virtio" is able to go only up to 720p with BSD guests in my system while "std" works without any problems. I didn't had space in my VM image to download the driver for "vmware" so I didn't tried that yet but I may do one day.

Sorry, I suppose the most "powerful" one will be the one that's better overall in everything. Best performance and support for the biggest possible resolution and HZ and of course having a good stability. I don't know if it works like that but for example, I used "virtio" and it didn't worked with DragonFlyBSD (and I think every other BSD that I tried) as a guest. So I think you can now understand my approach in the topic. I really don't know how emulation works at all...

In that context I think the most 'powerful' is what is perceived by the user as best for their purposes.

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I have used this guide for BSD GPU acceleration;

https://papers.freebsd.org/2019/euro...ated_graphics/

Guide is for FreeBSD but as its about BHYVE hypervisor it should work on DragonflyBSD too.

Yeah, I though about that two. It seems no "best of all" truly exists

Isn't BHYVE exclusive to FreeBSD HOSTS? Or am I wrong? I would at least be interested if I could use it in DragonFlyBSD as I'm planning to test this OS in metal some time in the future.

It can work with DragonflyBSD but requires some CLI work;

https://www.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web...hyve&section=8

Look at the current choices. Generally I'd suspect that the newest virtual driver would be the fastest.