The Feature Level 9_3 and Virtual Box question

If I recall correctly, it is possible to use Direct3D with Virtual Box, if you install the Guest Additions add-on (it's free, very easy to do when you've booted up the VM).

I haven't tried to do any DirectX11 work on a VirtualBox VM, though, and googling around, it looks like they may only support up to DirectX 9.0c. I would imagine that means that they only support hardware accelerating features from DirectX 9.0c (which should be equivalent with D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_9_3), since fully updated Windows 7 supports DirectX 11.

AFAIK no. VirtualBox does provide a DX9 driver, but I haven't got DX11 to work reliably at any feature level.

Nonetheless, the WARP driver does work and works "relatively" fast (it's slow, but much surprisingly faster than I expected, considering it's SW emulation)

Thank you for the answers.

I haven't used VirtualBox but I have used the free VMWare Player (which, despite the name, can also create VMs) successfully with D3D9 before.

I've also just checked DXDiag on a VMWare ESXi machine and can see that the VMWare SVGA driver supports WDDM 1.3 and Feature Levels 11.1 down to 9.1

So if it was me I'd be more inclined to use VMWare than VirtualBox for this kind of setup.

It at least somewhat supports DX11, I've used it for Windows Store apps (on feature level 9.3 I think, but don't remember right now). I had some problems with flickering though and sometimes the screen turned black, so no perfect support probably but enough to test that an app runs usually. https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#guestadd-3d

It looks like the VirtualBox 5 has an experimental support for 3D on Win7 and it is ok for me :)