Virtualization software that allows flexibility w/...

By their nature, virtual machines use a very simple gpu (graphics chip emulated in software.) Its not possible to fully emulate the 3d graphics cards that are needed to power recent games with any virtualization program currently available. What you are after isn't really feazible with current hardware/software.

Using VMware server you can give a vm more ram to use for the graphics card (i have bumped it up to 8mb to support larger scren resolutions in my vm's), but it will not give it any more 3d capabilities.

Hope this answers your question.

NO, thats the whole point of a VM, its all virtualized so its not tied to any particular piece of hardware.

Give vmware workstation a try for what your wanting to do, it does allow for a more "advanced" virtual graphics card to be emulated then virtual pc (iirc vmware uses a rage 128) Its not going to play any 3d games, but it might let you run graphics apps.

You could give VMWare Player a try. It does a pretty solid job graphics wise compared to everything else that I have used. I know that it handles the Aero interface ok.

I've not really used it much for eyecandy linux stuff...as most of my linux boxes are command line only. I do fool around with the eye candy stuff on my desktop computers running Ubuntu...but I find that it tends to screw with stability and such...so I don't use it all that much.

Thanks for the info Tim, I hadn't looked at virtualbox in a while, good to know about the experimental support. I'll have to play around with that sometime.