VirtualBox Windows 7 host+guest: how to enable 3d acceleration

Question

Is it possible to enable 3D acceleration on VirtualBox Windows 7 host and guest?

If so, how?

Sandeep Bansal · Answer 1 · 2011-04-03 19:26:16Z

up vote 2 down vote accepted

You need to install VirtualBox Guest Additions, it is in the Devices > Install Guest Additions option.

Then just simply follow the installation on screen.

As a note make sure you have set the vm to have the max allowed video memory or it won't give you the best or if any 3d acceleration.

answered Apr 3 '11 at 19:26

	in the guest aditions it says that i can install the 3d driver, because windows is not booted in safe mode. – clamp Apr 3 '11 at 19:32
	You shouldn't need to boot in safe mode, make sure you're using an admin account, and if you are just give safe mode a try, if you don't know how to just reset the guest os and then it will give you an option at the boot menu for safe mode, alternatively hit f5 constantly while windows is booting (the vm). – Sandeep Bansal Apr 3 '11 at 19:35
	Also note that the 3D acceleration support in VirtualBox is very unpolished. Aero (the glass effects) will not work and some 3D apps will crash. If you need good 3D acceleration in the virtual machine, you might want to try VMware Player -- I believe it's capable of presenting up to DX10 to the virtual machine. – TuxRug Apr 4 '11 at 5:13
	@TuxRug You might be thinking about previous versions of Vbox, the latest version has a very nice 3d capable driver, when installing Ubuntu 10.10 you can see 3d effects working perfectly, in 11.04 Unity works, whereas in vmware these do not, but in Windows 7, I'm not 100% sure if it has been fixed but I believe it could be. – Sandeep Bansal Apr 4 '11 at 12:39

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