I am running VB 6.1.20 on FreeBSD 12.2-STABLE with a Linux Mint 20 system. Guest additions are installed. I have tried to set the display driver to VBOXSVGA, but it seems to refuse to load it and runs VMSVGA. glxgears runs at 2-8 fps. It depends on how busy the CPU is, so it appears that acceleration is not used. Is this all I can expect? Makes graphics pretty limited. On Windows 10, I can set and run VBOXSVGA.
Oops! I'm running 13-STABLE on the FreeBSD host system, not 12.2.
In my experience graphics performance with virtualbox is never great, but definitely better than what you describe. 3D acceleration, in my experience is really spotty though. I'm using VBoxSVGA in all VMs, 3d acceleration off, and getting the standard capped 50-60 FPS with GLXGears. What graphics hardware do you have on the host machine? which X11 driver are you using? Do you have correct guest additions installed and working in the guest? Many parts need to work together to get acceptable performance. Anyway don't expect to be able to do things like playing a modern(or even not so modern) 3d game in a Virtualbox VM (don't know if you do that, it's just an example of something that will not work)
On my previous post I did not notice, you are running mint. I do have mint linux installed in VirtualBox. Mint linux comes WITHOUT additions by default. To get any kind of acceleration you need to manualy install additions. Other distributions have additions already installed by default. Easiest way is to use the VirtualBox "insert guest additons CD image..." menu then open and shell and navigate to the CD mountpoint (should be automounted to something like `/media/<username>/VBox_GAs_6.1.20/`) and run `sudo sh VBoxLinuxAdditions.run`, then reboot. You should get acceleration and all other additions goodies at this point. This needs to be repeated when you want to update additions, for new virtualbox versions, for example. Hope this helps.
As I mentioned, I have the VirtualBox 6.1.20 guest additions installed, so that is not the problem. I am running on a CometLake i5-10210U CPU and GPU in a Lenovo L15. I am running the latest drm-13fbsd-kmod. You first suggestion was right. It is that I have 3D Acceleration on. Once I turn it off, I can set the display to VBOXSVGA. It simply could not be selected with 3D enabled. With VBOXSVGA and no 3D, I get between 1780 and 1980 fps. There is a big hit on the CPU, of course, but is is a big win. Also, the system boots up much faster and login is faster. With 3D and VMSVGA, it took several minutes to boot and about 3 minutes just to login. Thanks so much! Unless there are further suggestions in the next couple of days, I'll close this, though the lack of 3D acceleration is disappointing.
(In reply to rkoberman from comment #4) I don't know if anything better can be done, this is the best I could do. I guess to get better 3d acceleration actual development work would be needed in various part (kernel, additions, virtualbox), but that's beyond my abilities.
Have not seen this issue in at least 4 months. OK with 6.1.26or 6.2.28, even with 3D acceleration.
(In reply to rkoberman from comment #6) Thanks for reporting back on this!