virtualbox.org

Has anyone successfully got Wow to work in a Windows guest? I've got it installed on a Windows XP guest under VB 4.0.8 with 3D acceleration running. It starts up fine, framerate in the login and character selection screens is great but things come to a grinding halt once you enter the world. None of this sounds overly conspicuous except, once you exit the game back to the character selection or login screens, they are also now running at about 1fps. This makes me wonder if the process is somehow losing 3D acceleration somewhere along the way. Am I missing something obvious?

And to head off the Why? comments, I know it will run under Wine but it seems it should also run under VB and I'd like to figure it out.

The graphics card of VB is not powerful enough. Wine may run it, because it can use the direct power of the Host video card. For the record, my PC has an nVidia 7800 GTX video card. This is still ways faster than what VB can provide, even with top notch video cards in SLI or CrossFire set up. The overhead is just too great.

It just seems odd that the login and character select screens work just fine and at a very decent frame rate. I would think if the VB video emulation could handle that, it could handle the game.

Nope, it doesn't. When my brother played it, there was a huge difference between the framerate at the login screen and at a town or some sorts. We installed it on my system temporarily when I just got my PC and there was enough difference between the login screen and the game itself. At login, it was about 100 fps, in the game, it dropped to half and almost to a 15 fps when in town. This slowdown and 'lag' can then be transferred to the rest of the game, because it still has a lot to render somehow, even though it's not showing.

This is what I think is going on, not what is actually going on. Check the CPU usage and if possible, the GPU usage on the Host side when you just start the game and when you're playing it.