You'd be surprised by what your PC can actually do, and that doesn't mean getting more performance out of it. Instead, there are features that unlock completely new ways to use your PC.

I'm talking virtualization, which is your computer's ability to run multiple systems on a single physical machine.

The setting for virtualization is called VT-x/AMD-V, and it's a setting that everyone should enable, whether you think you need it or not. You don’t need a specific application to enable it, and once done, it can massively boost performance on certain workloads.

In a nutshell, virtualization enables a software-based simulation that adds an abstraction layer over your physical hardware, so you can run two or more computers at the same time that exist separately and never interact with each other.

A hypervisor does the work: it acts as a bridge between the OS and the VM (Virtual Machine), allocating resources from the physical machine to the virtualized one on top.

The different types of hypervisors, as you may assume, have different uses; sometimes you use a hypervisor to run a virtual machine on your existing hardware, while you may use a different one to run a whole different operating system on the hardware itself while managing different hardware.

Since Android apps run on ARM architecture and most desktop PCs use x86, emulators like BlueStacks have to translate a lot of that code. These emulators don't explicitly require virtualization to work, but enabling it significantly speeds up the process.

The libhoudini layer inside BlueStacks translates code to x86, while virtualization lets the emulator use the CPU more efficiently by passing specific commands directly to the CPU instead of translating every instruction via the emulator's software emulation.

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