I’m new to Linux and of course KVM and Whonix. I’m not sure what to expect for performance. I have a lot of lag when watching videos over 480p (choppy) and most importantly, with common tasks. Just clicking on buttons and using scroll bars causes quite a bit of lag in the browser and in apps. I’m not trying to watch 4k vids but I would think 720 should be doable.

I realize Tor dramatically decreases bandwidth but I have zero issues with the Tor browser on Windows bare metal boxes and even with VMs in VMWare Workstation on a Windows host.

I’m guessing this is a hardware acceleration/pass-through issue. I have installed Debian-KVM-Whonix on an old machine and a newer, more powerful machine and they both perform the same. I’m using the Virtio driver with 3D Acceleration checked in Virtual Machine Manager.

I came across a couple of forum posts but some of the included links are dead and I see in the Wiki that hardware acceleration may not be achievable in Debian and could be a security risk??? I’d even consider switching to Qubes-Whonix if it performs better but I’ve read conflicting info on that subject.

Can someone point me in the right direction? I also need to know if having a GPU card is mandatory or if the on-board VGA is acceptable on newer or even older boxes. Ideally, I'd like to use one of my older boxes (HP 8300, Dell 7010) but I am considering purchasing a newer HP or Dell Tiny or micro PC for the final Debian-KVM-Whonix install but of course I would not be able to add a GPU. Specs are i7-9700T, 16GB RAM, SSD.

Running under a virtual environment means some or all of the hardware is virtualized, and you MAY have access to little or none of the hardware acceleration features of either the CPU or the GPU. Also, the CPU is being used primarily for the host, and only secondarily for the guest, and this CAN result in some additional slowdown in addition to the normal virtualization overhead.

A virtual environment is FANTASTIC for testing features, look and feel, and capability, but it is NOT a great way to observe native performance.

For native performance use Ventoy or E2B (Easy 2 Boot) to create a USB device and copy your ISO onto it. Then you can boot from that USB device, select your OS (with this software your USB drive can hold several, you select it from a menu) and run it in "live" mode. DO NOT INSTALL IT at least until you are ready to dedicate some hard drive to it, just run from USB. This gives you a test method that makes no changes to your installed OS or storage, but does allow you to test native acceleration.

If there is still some performance issue, you will know it is NOT just due to the virtualization.