virtualbox.org

On my 64 bit (AMD 6 core cpu) Suse 11.3/factory system, running 32 bit Windows XP inside VirtualBox, 3D graphics stability has been steadily degrading with every release since Oracle acquired Sun.

The latest release of VB has achieved a landmark in uselessness:
With 2D and 3D acceleration turned on (installed in Windows safe mode), QTGears, which is how I test for OpenGL operability, has worked since at least the 2.x version of VB. With this most recent version of VB, not only does QTGears not work, but starting it causes XP to crash, VB to crash and even X and the KDE 4.6.4 desktop to crash back to a terminal screen! When I run dxdiag, all direct3d tests fail.

VirtualBox support of OpenGL and DirectX are again operating as expected on my system. Evidence points to something breaking between VB and NVidia driver 270.x.x, which had previously come from a Suse update server. I installed NVidias 275.09.07 driver, which I downloaded directly from their web site, and the crashing issues were solved.

This does not mean there is any improvement in VBs support of DirectX. There is still no DirectX 7 and 8 support, which causes most of my Windows 3D applications to fail. However, at least we're not regressing, as I thought might be the case earlier.

For the record, VMWare does support DirectX 7 and DirectX 8 on a Linux system, which means that it can be done, if the willingness to put forth the effort is there!