Hey all! I recently installed a perfectly legal student version of SolidWorks in a Virtualbox Windows XP Guest. The host is a MacBook running OSX Leopard. I noticed that the Realview Graphics button was grayed out and after doing some research discovered that my Mac's Geforce9400M is not up to par with SolidWorks' standards for RealView Graphics. That is when I came across the Geforce->Quadro softmod article and tried to follow the steps. My issues appear to stem from the fact that I am using a guest OS in Virtualbox. My first issue arose from trying to run GPU-Z from inside the XP guest. GPU-Z doesn't retrieve any of the video cards specs. I think this is because the Graphics Adapter in Device Manager is "Virtualbox Graphics Adapter" instead of the actual video card. My first question "Is there a way for GPU-Z to access my Mac's video card through Virtualbox?" As there is no GPU-Z equivalent for Mac, a workaround through Virtualbox seems like my only option. So based on my first question you might be wondering how I know the Quadro equivalent to my Geforce model... I used the tables included with the softmod article and found the GPU Core to be G98. On a separate wikipedia site I found that the Quadro FX370LP has the same core. Is this similarity enough for this quadro model to be considered equivalent to my Geforce? I went ahead and assumed it would be. Next step in the softmod guide is to use RivaTuner. I had some issues with this as well. In the 'main' RivaTuner tab, the 'target adapter' is also listed as the 'VirtualBox Graphics Adapter' described above. When I click 'customize' the first icon is labelled 'low level refresh rate settings' as opposed to 'low level system settings' as described in the softmod article. I click this but the 'Low Level System Tweaks" dialog in the article never comes up. Again I think this is because VirtualBox is effectively blocking access to my video card through it's 'graphics adapter.' Any help resolving this would be greatly appreciated! -Jpots
In a virtual machine environment, everything is virtualized. You won't see 100% performance. Your host/OSX/mainOS is controlling the graphic card. Your virtual machine merely talks to your host to render graphics. It does not talk to your graphic card directly.
I would say it's impossible to mod your GeForce because... 1. You are in a virtualized environment. 2. The last moddable GeForce was based on the G80.
