I've been in your boat so many times, and I similarly thought good performance was impossible.
Just out of curiousity, did you spend much time tweaking the VM? Out of the box, for example, a Debian VM on my fast hardware does not perform very well. However, if I tweak the amount of RAM it gets (not too much, not too little, juuuuust right), the number of processors, amp up the video memory, try switching on/off 3d acceleration, and mess around with the actual Debian settings as well, I now have near perfect performance on it.
There's usually big threads out there on stackoverflow and forums with performance tips for your given host/guest/VM software.
Just out of curiousity, did you spend much time tweaking the VM? Out of the box, for example, a Debian VM on my fast hardware does not perform very well. However, if I tweak the amount of RAM it gets (not too much, not too little, juuuuust right), the number of processors, amp up the video memory, try switching on/off 3d acceleration, and mess around with the actual Debian settings as well, I now have near perfect performance on it.
There's usually big threads out there on stackoverflow and forums with performance tips for your given host/guest/VM software.