Looking at VMware's product guide, the only two products that support 3D are VMFusion and VMWare Workstation 6.5 (DX 9.0).

The ESX hypervisor doesn't offer any support for 3D and as mentioned previously, your method of connecting to those VM's is either through the console on the VI client, through Windows remote desktop or through NX / VNC on linux (none of which support 3D pass through AFAIK).

If I had the spare time, I'd fire up an XP VM on my test cluster just to nail it down.

-twig