Qubes uses the type-1 Xen hypervisor that runs at a similar privilege to the kernel of other OSes. KVM is a type-1 hypervisor implemented as a Linux kernel module. VirtualBox is a type-2 hypervisor that runs in userspace. Of these three, Xen is the most performant hypervisor because virtualization is all it does.
If by “typical VM” you mean a guest OS running inside a window of the host OS, then Qubes will always come out on top because the graphics pipeline is much less of a bottleneck.