PCI Pass-through problems
Try to run games or anything else that places any heavy graphical demands on a VirtualBox VM, and you won’t have much luck. VirtualBox’s 3D acceleration doesn’t really do anything for DirectX 10, 11 or 12 titles. There is a solution, but it’s one with some pretty heavy requirements. You need to run a Linux distribution as your host OS, and have two graphics cards in your physical machine, one of which you’ll use for your host — integrated graphics will do — and the other you’ll dedicate entirely to your VM. You also need to have a motherboard with an IOMMU unit, a CPU that supports it, and IOMMU enabled in the BIOS or UEFI. IOMMU is essentially a translation methodology, which maps physical memory addresses between guests and hosts — on AMD machines, you need to look for AMD-Vi, and on Intel, it’s Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O, or VT-d. These aren’t unusual features for modern boards, but we recommend you check compatibility before you kill off your everyday OS in favour of a Linux host.
From there, it’s a not-so-simple process of installing VirtualBox on your host OS (after ensuring it’s running a kernel that’s IOMMU-compatible), adding in the PCI passthrough extension through the catch-all extension pack, which can be downloaded from www.virtualbox.org, enabling IOMMU in your Linux distro’s boot loader (add something such as intel_iommu=on to grub.cfg), then using the ‘lspci’ command to check which PCI devices you have attached to your host hardware. The first column lists the PCI address of each device; you can then run a terminal command along the lines of VBoxManage modifyvm “VM name” --pciattach 02:00.0@ 01:05.0 to pass, in this case, the device at host address 02:00.0 to the guest address 01:05.0. Complex stuff, but entirely possible if you’re determined.