VMWare graphics performance much worse than Virtualbox

Question

I just benchmarked both Virtualbox and VMWare running Ubuntu 18.04 guest on Windows 10 host. Benchmark was using hardinfo. Both had the same system configuration, 4 CPU cores, 2GB RAM, 20GB disk, 3D acceleration enabled. As you can see from the scores below VMWare beats Virtualbox in almost every benchmark, except the GPU Drawing bench where it's more than 25x slower. What's going on here? Computer is an Asus ROG with i7-6700HQ, 8GB RAM, 1TB 850Evo SSD, GTX960M

The interesting thing is, general window UI responsiveness is way way better using VMWare.

Bench               Higher/Lower Is Better      Vbox        VMWare
CPU Blowfish        Lower                       3.23        2.60
CPU Cryptohash      Higher                      385.00      477.16
CPU Fibonacci       Lower                       1.56        0.64
CPU N-Queens        Lower                       6.91        6.69
CPU Zlib            Lower                       0.36        0.43
FPU FFT             Lower                       1.34        1.20
FPU Raytracing      Lower                       3.27        2.25
GPU Drawing         Higher                      11231.31    428.77

Answer 1

VMWare probably has its driver for accelerating graphics offload enabled. This allows the VMware guest to utilize your GPU fairly directly rather than going through very lengthy hypervisor calls or not being able to use the GPU at all. Did you turn on 3D acceleration in Vbox? It is in the hardware options.