virtualbox.org

I am trying to get a bunch of older software to run that worked great on my win7 pc, but won't run in windows 10. When I try to run descent freespace for example, I get an error that states "Error! No Direct3d device found!"
I have enabled the add on and given the guest machine access to both 3d and 2d acceleration. Is there any way to get this worked around? OR am I just out of luck?

I guess you did not install the guest additions properly. Did you read section 4.5 of the user manual? Summary: you must install the WDDM drivers, or you must install the WDM drivers while Win7 is running in safe mode. I can't promise that either version will make the game happy: VirtualBox is not tailored for running graphics oriented games.

If you want to continue the discussion then provide a VM log file. With the VM fully shut down, right click it in the GUI. Select "Show Log" and save "VBox.log" (no other file) to a zip file. Attach the zip here.

Programs like these tend to push the physical hardware to their limit hence the strict requirements for the graphics card (GPU) specifications. Virtual machines will never be as powerful as the host, especially on the video side. They use after all a virtual graphics card, not your host's real graphics card. The virtual GPU itself is from around 1995-2000 in terms of capabilities. Applications that have high requirements on the GPU (drawing, 3D, games, video) are expected to not work as good as on the real hardware, if they work at all.

The new option for the VBoxSVGA graphics controller is supposed to be the new and improved graphics support that became a reality with 6.0.0. But, since it's the very first "run" of that option, the .0 release, I expect it to be buggy at the beginning. I guesstimate that by 6.1.0 both the performance and the quality will have improved dramatically.

I would certainly give the VBoxSVGA driver a go. I am not into graphics, but I gave it a try a few days ago to see what happens. When you boot the Windows 7 vm it sees the new device and loads the drivers. If you run Windows Experience again the graphics performance goes from 1 to 5.5 and Aero glass works.