VMWare has the best virtual graphics performance IMHO. Hyper-V or Virtualbox is just painful in comparison. Until graphic vendors support partitioning GPU resources to allow sharing the main GPU to a VM using passthrough, it will likely remain one of the best options for many.
Yep, this is the exact reason. I started on Virtualbox but jumped over to VMWare because the graphics virtualization was too broken under Virtualbox to do testing for web browser development (I was interning at Mozilla at the time).