How to enable 3D acceleration in VirtualBox

Well today i was just messing around with my VM, working on an assignment, and i discovered (finally) what i had missed when trying to activate 3D acceleration.

At the time i assumed it was an automatic feature, that as long as you had the latest version of VirtualBox and the guest additions it would run. This turned out to be false. I found a check-box hiding in the Virtual Machine's settings which enabled the 3D acceleration and eliminated the messages i was getting about the video adapter not having any 3D acceleration. Here's a screenie of the offending checkbox:
Check this little beauty, have the VirtualBox guest additions installed, and you're good to go. Note that VBox's Mouse Integration (MI) feature seems to cause the mouse to play up in games, so i found turning MI off during games was the most effective way of solving the problem.

The performance is pretty mediocre, as you would expect, but everything works for me (apart from the mouse bug). Here's a screenshot of one of my all-time favourite games to prove it, running in VBox (Freelancer):
The rest of the process i hope i explained well enough in my previous post, but if not just drop me a comment.

Virtualbox and Windows Direct3D/DirectX

As i already mentioned in a previous post, lately i've been quite a keen user of Ubuntu Linux for the last few months, and as part of my experience i've been running an XP VM on my Ubuntu install to supplement WINE and make up for the areas it lacks in (such as XP/Windows development tools). For my VM i've been Using VirtualBox OSE (open source edition), which provided me with all of the functionality i needed, and was handily available on the Ubuntu repositories.

The Downside to VirtualBox initially was it's lack of 3D acceleration support; originally it didn't allow any, and one release after i started using it they aded openGL support for linux. Well i just checked it again after the most recent update, and it seems Direct3D (directX) support has indeed finally been added (Yay, games).

Note at this stage DirectX 10 support is still marked as experiemental, so if you were going to try and run a Vista or Windows 7 install with DirectX10, you might still have a little longer to wait. I tried getting the DirectX support working; everything from installing the latest guess additions to updating my VM. Kept getting a message saying that the graphics device does not support Direct3D. For the moment, i give up. Maybe i'll have more luck with future versions down the track.