How to enable 2D acceleration

[xasx]

Hello!

To say it briefly: With the 3.10 BETA I can't enable 2D acceleration for any guest. Are there any special requirements for it to work?

Kind regards,
xasx

[xasx]

This thread could probably be merged with some posts of VirtualBox 3.1 BETA - Small bugs

[zhangxinc]

Starting with version 3.1, the VirtualBox Guest Additions contain experimental hardware 2D video acceleration support for Windows guests.

With this feature, if an application (e.g. a video player) inside your VM uses 2D video overlays to play a movie clip, then VirtualBox will attempt to use your host's video acceleration hardware instead of performing overlay stretching and color conversion in software (which would be slow). This currently works for Windows, Linux and Mac host platforms, provided that your host operating system can make use of 2D video acceleration in the first place.

The 2D video acceleration currently has the following preconditions:

It is only available for Windows guests (XP or later).

The Guest Additions must be installed.

Because 2D support is still experimental at this time, it is disabled by default and must be manually enabled in the VM settings (see Section 3.3, “General settings”).

Technically, VirtualBox implements this by exposing video overlay DirectDraw capabilities in the guest video driver. The driver sends all overlay commands to the host through a special communication tunnel implemented by VirtualBox, in order for the host to perform the requested 2D operations via the host's programming interfaces.

[xasx]

Thanks zhangxinc for your answer. What I meant was, that I am unable to check the checkbox due to it being disabled.

What I noticed is that there's a window in some non-producable circumstances thats title is something with Gecko Rendering.

Nonetheless I am not even able to turn 2D acceleration on (regardless of what's the guest OS).

[Perryg]

First you need to install the guest additions in safe mode and then select the 3d section. (Windows guests)
But depending on you results it may not work. See this topic for my results in x64 http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=24580
32 seems to work as stated. But keep in mind that this is still experimental and may or may not work for you.
Please post log file (as attachments) so we can see the problem areas.

[xasx]

OK, since nobody seems to understand what I mean I will post a screenshot.

I can't even check the box from the beginning because it is disabled.

For what's the cause with GA: They are installed and up-to-date.

[mpack]

I also have the problem of the 2D acceleration checkbox being grayed out (XP Pro SP2 host). The GAs are obviously not relevant to this - how can the UI know which version of the GAs are installed in a VM that isn't running? This seems to be a straightforward bug in the UI. (Sorry if I sound irritated - I am! - I've been fighting this simple bug for the last hour).

Anyway, in order to enable the checkbox I had to manually add the accelerate2DVideo="true" option to the display section of the VM xml. After that the option was still grayed out in the UI but at least it was checked. I then ran the dxdiag DirectDraw tests inside the VM and it went MUCH faster, so the feature was obviously working.

[mpack]

in order to enable the checkbox I had to manually add the accelerate2DVideo="true" option to the display section of the VM xml

This is really infuriating! I created a clone to test something else, but I also attempted to repeat what I did before to get 2D acceleration working, and the checkbox won't stay enabled! I have absolutely no idea what I need to do to get this thing to work.

[Perryg]

Post a log file of the offending guest.
Mine is full at the top where VBox looks for and tests the ability of my (host) Video adapter.
I suspect that if you Host card does not support the right things it does not turn it on, but need to see Logs from others to be sure.

[mpack]

I suspect that if you Host card does not support the right things it does not turn it on.

Note two messages back where I describe what happened when I was able to enable the feature by editing the xml (a feat I have not been able to repeat) - the performance difference running the DirectDraw test in dxdiag was huge, so my hardware definitely does support the necessary feature.

Also, what log are you talking about? On my copy the 2D option is disabled by the UI before the VM is ever run.

[Perryg]

Don,

I am not doubting that your card can handle it, What I am saying is that there seems to be some sort of reporting issue in the VBox program.
It is my belief that the testing is done whether the 2D is activated or not since it would be a portion of the main program to check.
Start the guest once with the new version and then close it. Open the log files at the top of the VBox main program and look at that file.
Does it show the Video card information? Compare it to the one that works, albeit not being able to select it properly.

[mpack]

Unfortunately I can't compare logs since I no longer have the VM which worked. I ran into a problem with snapshots and restored my .VirtualBox folder from a backup, which destroyed the VM. It was in trying to restore this function in a test VM that I found I couldn't repeat what I did earlier. I did have a look at a log anyway earlier, but couldn't make much sense of it (too much info, not enough time).

[mpack]

This is strange! After a couple of hours playing poker I decided to give this issue one last go before shutting down the PC. So, I edited the xml one more time, setting the option to true. This time when I started the VBox UI I saw an immediate change in behaviour: the 2D option now showed as enabled in the VM summary, and when I ran the VM, sure enough, it now had the higher performance I saw before. I had made absolutely no changes to any VM, it seems like leaving VBox not running for a while was all it needed.

I know that VBoxSVC stays in memory for a few secs after the VM is shut down - and of course I was shutting down both the VM and the GUI before editing the xml. I'd be surprised if I was doing the edits that quickly. Oh well, at least there's progress.

[Sasquatch]

The VBoxSVC process can still be running after a few minutes, and some locks can last up to 10-20 minutes. Really strange.

[Technologov]

I am unable to enable it too on my Windows hosts.

My experience is similar to that of xasx.

-Technologov