TIP: 3D Acceleration in a VirtualBox Windows-guest

[s4l0m0n]

This ohne drove me insane, so i wanted to share the little trick that did it for me:

Of course you need a working OpenGL acceleration in your host. (in my case done with latest nvidia-drivers from portage).
Set up Windows in the VM as usual, install the guest-additions matching your vbox version (in my case 3.1.8 . As I write this, 3.2 is out which fixes some regressions for Direct3D in guests. I will give it a try).
Important: Boot windows in safe-mode when installing the additions. Otherwise windows will just overwrite the dlls providing the 3D/2D acceleration. I didnt read this in the manual in the first place and I wondered why no acceleration was available in the guest. You can access this mode by holding F8 during startup of windows.

The translation-layer is capable of handling directx8/9 and opengl requests from the guest, so in theory most recent games should work. I didnt do massive testing though.
Anyhow playing Warcraft3 in the guest works at least with -opengl without further problems (direct3d may also work). For me, this solutions is much more convenient than pure wine, as I got stricter seperation.

I hope this helps some of you loosing less time with setting up a accelerated guest.

Update:
Today I did the upgrade to virtualbox-ose-3.2.0. Thus, newer guest-additions in vista were required. Once I installed them (once again in safe-mode), the guest was broken. Vista didnt get any further than the welcome message after login. Booting in safe-mode however worked. After deinstalling the additions in this mode and installing them again, I was fine again.