virtualbox.org

Hello all. I am running a 32 bit Windows 8 guest in a 64 bit Kubuntu 14.04.1 LTS Trusty host. I'm giving 2048/3932 mb of memory to the VM, which should be more than enough to preserve at least 1 gb for the host as I've seen recommended in forums. For the most part it seems to be running great. The problem is that when I tried to run EverQuest 2 in it, it was insanely, unusably slow even on the lowest settings. After some research I discovered that installing Guest Additions and enabling 3D acceleration can result in a dramatic performance increase, so I went ahead and installed the GA. After I ran the installer twice (as the UG seemed to suggest a second time for updating the installation) and then rebooted, EverQuest wouldn't run at all, instead giving me the following error:

Fatal Error: EverQuest II has detected an unrecoverable error and must shutdown. <verify> G:\live\eq2\framework\core\devices\DirectX9RenderDevice.cpp (1950): Failed to create a D3D device for VirtualBox Graphics Adapter for Windows 8. 01b954a2 5c657669

I set to work researching a solution and tried everything I could find. Realizing I'd installed the Guest Additions in normal mode instead of safe mode, I went back and uninstalled them from safe mode. While they were uninstalled, I tested EverQuest II and it ran again, slow as ever. Then I reinstalled GA in safe mode as I should have in the first place. The error came back and the game would not load. I've tried installing DirectX 9 in addition to the already installed DX11, per the suggestion of some people in the EverQuest forums, but that didn't help. I allocated more video memory and another processor from my quad core AMD processor (giving my VM 2/4 cores, I presume).

I am attaching my log file as a zip, but feel free to ask me for any information that would be useful and I will do my utmost to supply it. Thanks in advance for your time and effort in responding.

Since the error I'm getting is DirectX related, here's my dxdiag results, in case it helps.

Your virtual machine is using virtual hardware, including a virtual graphics card. Programs like these tend to push the physical hardware to their limit. Virtual machines will never be as powerful as the host, specially on the video side. Applications that have high requirements on the GPU (drawing, 3D, games, video) are expected to not work as good, if they work at all.

Yes, which is something that I understand and find very logical. However, I'd still like to see if there's any amount of improvement with GA installed and 3D acceleration working. Therefore, any help I can get with resolving this issue and getting past the error would be wonderful. Thank you for taking the time to respond, by the way.