What do you mean? The VBox VESA BIOS is buggy? (There's not much else in a "VESA implementation") I really don't think that's the case. It is a bit slower than VMware, but never felt ridiculously so. And definitely qemu feels slower, and IMHO has a much worse and less compatible implementation (yes, the VBox BIOS forks from qemu, but at a point where qemu cared a bit more about retro-compatibility than nowadays). At worst I'd argue they are practically the same implementation.

> But the point stands that a non-accelerated video option will perform worse than an accelerated one for all VMs for anything but the simplest of blitting pipelines.

That's why I put the example that Haiku on a completely not accelerated framebuffer performs miles better than Windows 11 on an accelerated 2 year old GPU. The GUI parts only, of course. Try it. It's just insane difference. And yes I do have 5k screens..

For 9x, even if it actually supported 2D acceleration, newer cards seem to do a terrible job at it.