Virtual video cards and graphics
In order to make the graphics work on virtual machines, QEMU needs to provide two components to its virtual machines: a virtual video card and a method or protocol to access the graphics from the client.
Virtual video card
The purpose of the graphics card is to provide graphics output to a display device. A virtual graphics card can also perform the same function. QEMU supports emulation of multiple graphics cards, and you can use libvirt to add those emulated graphic cards to the virtual machines. The emulated graphic cards options are:
Cirrus (Default in libvirt): Cirrus Logic GD5446 Video card. All Windows versions starting from Windows 95 should recognize and use this graphic card. For optimal performance, use 16-bit color depth in the guest and the host OS.
VGA: Standard VGA card with Bochs VBE extensions. If your guest OS supports the VESA 2.0 VBE extensions (e.g. Windows XP) and if you want to use high resolution modes (>= 1280x1024x16), then you...