virtualbox.org

I just bought a new graphics card with 512mb of ram and the display property is till reporting a maximum of 128mb of video ram, the value of my old on board graphics card. my new graphics card is also a relatively new nvidia 9600gt and should support acceleration, it doesn't seem to (qtgears doesn't run in windows). any ideas?

The video inside a VM is emulated, the VM will never see the Host video card directly, so it doesn't matter what you stick in.

perhaps I should clarify that I'm using hardware acceleration. I also meant the virtualbox display property where you select how much ram and whether or not it's hardware accelerated not the windows display properties.

Answer is still the same: the VM has no clue what card you have. A Voodoo2 or a Geforce 295 GTX is still the same for it. It gets a virtual one. Didn't you check the VirtualBox FAQ, as suggested by the Forum Posting Guide?

The only thing you need to do, is make sure the Guest has the right things in place, the GA with 3D enabled.

sorry misunderstood you post, please disregard that.

In the vm display setting the maximum video rem I can allocate to any virtual system is locked to 128mb despite my graphics card having 512mb of video ram. shouldn't I be able to allocate more memory to the guest? opengl acceleration is not working in my guest os either, despite it being supported by my card and 3d acceleration being enabled.

the first thing I did when I discovered this problem was read all the docs I could, none of them mention maximum video ram being automatically locked at below 128mb's...

Yes and no.
Yes you can use some parts of video features the Host has.
No you can't use exotic features the Host video card might offer such as 512mb ram.

It remain emulated for most parts, despite the 3d/opengl functions for Guests these features still travel via VBox without full videocard access. Its just like vt-x, it allows Guest code to run directly on a Host core but the Guest does not have full core access.

ahh, I see. it might be a good idea to add that the guest os can only use up to 128mb's of vid card memory despite how much memory your card has to the faq. my opengl still doesn't work but knowing that that's not the problem I can try to approach it from a different angle. thank you.

Maybe we should adjust the FAQ but then again such things are part of what makes a virtual machine, basicly everything is isolated between the Guest and the Host hardware, the problem with this is that in order to make more features work and to speed up virtual machines, connections are made that actually have nothing more to do with virtualization. The more hardware is produced that allows hardware isolation the more products like VBox will use that simply because it makes things faster and richer in features that can be offered to Guests.

I think the term virtualization needs to be redefined in order to better describe whats going on with regard to more and better hardware virtualization support.

The FAQ already states that you can't use the full power of your physical graphics card, because it doesn't see it, like all the other hardware (fancy 8 channel surround audio card, wireless network cards, etc). I updated the FAQ to reflect the 3.0.0 addition of DX8/9.

ashadocat wrote:ahh, I see. it might be a good idea to add that the guest os can only use up to 128mb's of vid card memory despite how much memory your card has to the faq. my opengl still doesn't work but knowing that that's not the problem I can try to approach it from a different angle. thank you.

The guest doesn't use any of the vid card memory directly. The setting just tells vbox how much host system RAM (not vid RAM) should be reserved for the virtual guest video memory buffer.