I supposed 256 MB might not be enough for some tasks, but it's plenty for everything I've ever tried to do.
You might be right, I don't do a lot of (read: any) 3D work.
Modern workstation graphics cards have up to 12GB of vram. Nvidia Pascal is said to support 32GB. Anything above 256MB and Virtualbox crashes on boot. Obviously vmware isn't perfect either, and can't match a native machine, but it does support much more vram. For many applications, 256MB is unusable. Furthermore, the actual gpu performance suffers greatly in virtualbox. I had UI lag on a 1080p monitor with a 780ti in ubuntu.
They both support VT-x and AMD-V. Are you talking about a subset of these? Do you have any sources since I'd like to read about it more.
I don't have vmware workstation 11 installed anymore, and can't for the life of me remember what it was called. But if IIRC it had a newer hardware visualization extension that Virtualbox did not have.
How so?
I don't think Virtualbox supports nesting; other various features in the setup and live menus and things that the vmware tools extension enables.
Not for me it doesn't. Clicking on the start menu is instant, the only way it would be faster is if it opened up before I clicked the mouse. From cold boot Windows 7 is at a working desktop in 12 seconds flat (I just timed it), most bare metal Windows installations would struggle to keep up with that.
I'm not saying VMWare isn't better, but nothing you've said so far about VirtualBox's limitations or "lagging" has been true in my experience.
I ran Ubuntu on Virtualbox and vmware workstation 11 when I had it installed. Using it as an actual os (browsing the web, managing files, etc) was night and day. This could be because of the better implemented 3D acceleration. Benchmarks show CPU performance much closer however, with vmware products having the slight edge.
Finally, vmware just works. It is extremely easy to get going. With virtualbox, I run into countless errors getting it to boot various os's. I just tried Windows 10 insider with default/conservative settings and it didn't even get to the boot screen. It's annoying to troubleshoot. With vmware I ran the less stable Windows 10 technical preview as a VM in a Ubuntu 14.10 VM running on a Windows 8.1 machine.
Obviously one is paid and the other is free. You can try out vmware however using alternative methods
, only then can you make comparisons.