VirtualBox Gaming issue

Virtualbox is not intended for gaming and will not work very well if it works at all. Any old DOS games can be run on Windows by using DOSBox, almost all old Win32 games can be made to run with a few work arounds. If you let us know what games you want to play we will help find the best solution

virtual machines are not able to take full advantage of your GPU. they just use a generic video driver and have limited directx functionality

Thanks for the replies!!! I decided in the end to do a dual installation. Seems odd that there wasnt a virtual computer capable of handling games. Never mind got round the issue, Thanks for the help.

The game was Spell Force 2 btw  

Virtualbox has some 3D capabilities but they are extremely slow

VMWare Workstation has 3D capabilities that are much much better than Virtualbox (about 5-10 times better in Workstation 8.0.4). If you want to test it out you can use the VMWare Workstation Tech Preview until October 15th for free, just google it.

The problem is one of drivers: Its very, very difficult to emulate low level driver access within a virtualized environment, running on top of another OS. As a result, most of this access is done via software, which is slower and often lacks support.

DOS games can typically be run through Dosbox, and *most* 32-bit games can be made to run with a little tinkering. The only games that you will have problems with are 16-bit windows application when running on Win64 [as 16-bit exe's are no longer supported].