virtualbox.org

I just updated Virtualbox after a year, and realized, while making a new machine, that the VRAM can now be increased to 2GB if the monitor count is 64. Now, in the older version that I was using, in order to get 256MB, I would put the monitor count slider to 32, and the VRAM at 256MB. Then, go back in, change it to one monitor and the VRAM would stay at 256. However, this isn't the case now, and I'd really like to get at least 512MB of my 1GB card utilized by the VM. I tried "vboxmanage modifyvm XP --vram 1024" but I got an error saying, essentially, that the size had to be between 1 and 256.

Is it just not possible yet? Ideas?

I'm running 10.6.8 on a 2010 iMac, Quad i5, 16GB RAM, etc.. Video card is a Radeon HD 5750

I don't believe the host's video card memory is actually used. I believe it comes from the overall memory you set for the guest.

Giving the guest more simulated VRAM than it has a use for... serves no purpose. If it was useful you might wonder why VBox didn't make it easier. The VM has no GPU, all fancy rendering (in 3D mode) is done by the host. All the VM needs is enough RAM (per monitor) to buffer a few full screen images. Anything beyond that would be wasted.

Well then I'll ask this. Is gaming even possible on a virtual machine, even if I were to add more video memory? I have been able to run some graphically intensive games on one I had a while back, but I thought that the poor performance came from having insufficient video memory assigned to the VM.

If I were able to allow the VM to use, let's say, half of what my video card is capable of, that should increase gaming performance. Really the only reason I want to be able to play games on here instead of BootCamp is because I game so rarely that it really wouldn't be worth losing a chunk of the HDD to a Windows partition.

To be competely frank: video-heavy games should be expected to perform poorly on simulated hardware.