3D acceleration becomes total deceleration on HP laptop with AMD/ATI 6770M graphics card with dynamic switching -> host driver issue

[orrorin]

Host Config: Windows 7 64b on HP Pavilion dv6 with AMD/ATI 6770M graphics card with Dynamic switching. Guest Config: Ubuntu 11.10

The laptop's graphics card supports dynamic switching, which implies that the graphics driver can dynamically decide whether to use the generic (Intel) graphics card for power save or the AMD/ATI card for performance. AMD provides an application called Catalyst which allows user to specify which card should be used for an application. (Default card is generic.)

I specified Performance card for VirtualBox application, but the graphics driver seems to allocate generic card to VirtualBox. As a result, the guest OS cannot make use of 3D acceleration (even if it is enabled from the VirtualBox GUI for that VM).

Ideally, if 3D acceleration is enabled then VirtualBox should enforce usage of the performance card on the graphics driver through an ioctl like system call on Windows.

The current work around from HP is to disable dynamic graphics switching from the BIOS.

​https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=46120

[Michael Thayer]

I understand that this is frustrating, but I don't really think that we can do much about it (or did I miss something?). If ​comment 6 in the HP forum thread that you linked to is correct then the dynamic switching is not supported for OpenGL applications, and VirtualBox uses OpenGL for 3D passthrough so that we can use the same code on three different platforms.