MacOS – Poor performance with Virtual Box on MacBook Pro 2017

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I am running Ubuntu 16.04 via Virtual Box on my MacBook Pro 2017 w/ TouchBar (3.3Ghz i7, 16 GB 2133 MHZ) and I am getting a very laggy and unpleasant experience on the machine. I have gone through the suggested changes from 7 years ago here: https://superuser.com/questions/172989/virtualbox-running-ubuntu-is-slow-mac-os-x-host

But it does not seem to make a difference. Even when I change the resolution to 720p the performance is still quite poor. Here are the settings for the vm: 

 <Hardware>
  <CPU>
    <PAE enabled="true"/>
    <LongMode enabled="true"/>
    <X2APIC enabled="true"/>
    <HardwareVirtExLargePages enabled="true"/>
  </CPU>
  <Memory RAMSize="8192"/>
  <HID Pointing="USBTablet"/>
  <Chipset type="ICH9"/>
  <Display VRAMSize="128"/>
  <VideoCapture fps="25" options="ac_enabled=false"/>
  <RemoteDisplay>
    <VRDEProperties>
      <Property name="TCP/Ports" value="3389"/>
    </VRDEProperties>
  </RemoteDisplay>
  <BIOS>
    <IOAPIC enabled="true"/>
  </BIOS>
  <USB>
    <Controllers>
      <Controller name="OHCI" type="OHCI"/>
    </Controllers>
  </USB>
  <StorageController name="IDE" type="PIIX4" PortCount="2" useHostIOCache="true" Bootable="true">

Any thoughts on the settings? I feel like I should be able to get some decent performance out of this machine. (I have tried smaller RAMsizes with no success either). Alternative solutions if this a common Virtual Box issue?

Best Answer

The problem is Retina itself. If you use other monitor with other resolution (no retina) you'll see much better performance. I think it's an issue with OSX and Retina/HiDPI Resolutions.

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