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Virtualbox 3.0 Announces OpenGL/Direct3D Support
bl8n8r writes "Apparently, Virtualbox 3.0 released today (2009-07-01) brings with it 'OpenGL 2.0 for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests; and experimental support for Direct3D 8/9 applications on Windows guests.' Maybe we can finally game in a VM?"
What do you mean finally? I'm playing Minesweeper in a VM now.
I remember VMware implementing this several months ago. It was experimental, I don't know about it's status right now.
No ascii art.
"Experimental" generally means "full of tons of bugs." 3D virtualization seems like it is just hard to do, at this point. VMWare has been working on it and at this point it isn't even "experimental" in the latest version of VMWare Workstation. Well it works... kinda. It's fairly slow and there are some rendering errors. I can get WoW to run, but it isn't all that playable.
I've been watching this sort of thing with interest since old games are one of the things I'm very fond of. However at this point, 3D VMs seem to be an experimental playtoy, not something that can be used for serious gaming.
i have a HD4870X2+4850 CFed...why not use one of the cores for the VM or both of the 4870X2 cores and leave the other for the host ?
its easy to have multiple GPUs now s why not just take advantage of them ?
It can use FreeBSD as a host O/S.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I use Virtual box on a pair of mac intel core duo 2 machines to run windows XP pro I'm very pleased with it. It essentially works perfectly. I don't care that it is only single processor since All I want is basic seemless windows functionality for those few cases where software is windows only.
it works well with USB devices. I use it to program Lego Mindostorms, and for Midi (to USB) keyboard input and some thumb drives.
it will mount any folder on my mac disk either permenantly or temporarily (these show us as X: or Y: or whatever). What's mildly annoying is that this is 2 step process: first you tell the VM to "add the drive" then you have to use a windows "run" command "net use x: " to tell windows about it. the second step seems strange to me, but you only do it one time.
I've had three things I could not figure out.
I never was able to get a windows media player to mount in media player mode so I could use windows DRM protected WMA files on it and manage it from within windows media player 11. Instead it only will mount as a thumb drive.
I was not able to get a virtual CD device to mount an iso image or burn an iso image (as a work around for getting the WMA files in a format I could play).
It will not burn a CD or DVD.
also I never figured out how to add my Samsung C310 printer to it or my HP multifunction printer to it. it does see them, it just never finds the drivers. However I'm pretty certain this is a windows driver problem and nothing to do with the VM.
I don't game so open GL means squat to me.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
When the hell are they going to support GRE over NAT? Some of us don't have any choice -- our company uses PPTP VPNs.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I played around with this a bit in the beta. It's significantly slower than native and has a fair share of graphics glitches, but it was good enough to take my dual-monitor computer, plug in a second keyboard and mouse, and play two games of Warcraft III against eachother simultaneously using only one box.
I would think it would be actually easier to implement a VM for an OpenGL window, at least in terms of calls goes. I would be willing to bet that there are less calls in OpenGL than there are in a rich 2d API. There's only so many ways to slice a polygon.
But at least on Windows there's historically been the issue of making an OpenGL window a child of the main window and other weird stuff like that, and I believe the same issue applies to DirectX. I can't say I know enough about Linux to know whether or not it has the same problem.
This is my sig.
As I use Linux (Ubuntu and openSUSE) on my primary home machines, I tend to run the Windows stuff - aside from Office 2007 - in VB. My kids have always complained about the game play.
:P
Maybe not now.
It worked great when they were younger and Tux Paint, SuperTux, Chromium, TORCS, TuxRacer were what they wanted, but now they NEED to play the "in" gamez.
<sigh>
I'll just go back to playing my games on Stella and GFCE.
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I used a much older version of Vmware (4.x) to install WxP and run Unreal Tournament using Software Rendering. The game was playable, didn't look pretty and the FPS were a bit on the low end, but the game was playable. Won't Windows 7 support D3D over RDP?
Pardon my ignorance, but aren't most games using DirectX and not OpenGL, hence the lack of serious games for Linux?
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Maybe we can finally game in a VM? Try it. I get about 12fps in Guild Wars on a 3.4G p4 with 2GB ram and a 512MB nvidia 9500. Yeah 15 frames per second. Guild Wars runs perfect on half this hardware on Windows. Unfortunately Wine has quite a performance hit on this machine as well, so I'm still stuck with Windows for GW.
put the what in the where?
With virtualbox from Sun! now with three-d acceleration!
You've got problems, we all know what it's like not being able to develop on windows - but you can't seem to give up counterstrike! Notepad carriage return issues, archaic command line functions, the works - all gone in a jiffy with Virtualbox(tm)!
Want to pwn noobs from the comfort of a linux environment!? No problem. Toss xp on there, Bam! It's done!
Want to show people your awp skills while still being able to strace!? Easy as boom-headshot with virtualbox!
Call now and for no extra cost we'll throw in the latest jre for absolutely free!
Having just installed the x64 3.0 binaries for Windows and given Windows 7 and Windows Vista a spin in VirtualBox I can say that both OSes fail to recognise the 3D capabilities since the driver isn't WDDM-compatible. So Media Center, Aero Glass, and the new games in Vista/Win7 all fail to show in their fully accelerated glory. Interestingly, VirtualPC 7 in Windows 7 does support Aero Glass when you have Vista as a guest.
The Direct3d support is not designed for gaming, but it works for the most part. I have found a few games which do not work, Fallout 3 America's Army 3, but also many which do work, Counter Strike Source America's Army 2 Team Fortress 2 Rise of Nations.
This could be the upgrade I've been waiting for... now all I have to do is dig up an old copy. Has anyone tried it already?
Unfortunately, looks like they still haven't fixed bug 1040, or even upgraded its priority from 'minor.' The gist of it is, do not even think about touching anything in the GUI relating to the 'snapshot' feature, unless you really, absolutely, positively understand what you're doing. The wording is very confusing, and can easily lead to data loss scenarios. Unfortunately, since this is a human interface flaw, and not a programming error, it seems like it's not really being taken seriously. In my mind, sadly, this is exactly the sort of macho hacker mentality that keeps OSS from mainstream acceptance.
Is that the right direction for VirtualBox? Shouldn't they add some virtual machine management features first? I think snapshot trees instead of links would be a much more helpful feature than being able to somewhat use a performance-sensitive feature in a virtual environment. Transferring virtual machines to a different host without having to recreate them by hand would be a nice feature too.
How many times do I have to tell people that gaming in VMs just doesn't work. Yes, this feature will add support for a lot of graphically accelerated applications and probably even the older games, but the fact is that you still cannot beat direct graphics access!
Virtualbox uses the D3D to OpenGL code from Wine (which I love very much). We aren't talking about DirectX from Windows pushed through to your graphics card.
However don't get me wrong, it will eventually be possible! Gallium3D will have the architecture to support DirectX in Linux (as I understand it anyway, please correct if this is false) which means that you could do a Virtualized Windows direct connection (passthrough) to the graphics driver which should be nearly as good as native performance!
They had USB, seamless mode, folder sharing, and clipboard (txt) support since version 1.x. Most of the additions that had been done since didn't really matter to me. What's really missing for a more seamless integration for me is support for drag and drop of files and other objects between host and guest. Other VMs support such functionality, so I wonder why VBox isn't doing it, despite all their fancy efforts.
OpenGL games tend to be very easy to get working on Wine, unlike Direct3D games, so this will just give us one more way to run what we already can. Direct3D games will continue to be Windows territory.
VMware refuses to implement ALSA sound for a Linux host. I condemn VMware straight to Hell.
Games are the last bastion for a seperate Windows install.
The audio stuff (Reason, FLStudio) etc work perfectly well under VirtualBox now.
You need to use ASIO4ALL to get asio working, but once done and fiddled with... hah! 10ms audio latency in a freakin' virtual machine! That is just so awesome to me!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Isn't allowing guests this much access to the graphics card a terrible idea! Given that even the limited, well implemented, xbox360 hypervisor still let exploits slip through, implementing this must mitigates the security benefits of the VM. I'm under the impression that you used to needed elevated privileges on unix system to prevent potential exploits by executing code on the graphics card and modifying memory DMA and all that, over time it seems the potential for these exploits has got worse; graphics cards are pretty powerful and complex, graphics drivers are often buggy (and i assume porly vented for vulnerabilities), laptops are widespread and use the same memory as the OS, yet the protection has been dropped in favor of ease of use.
And if the above comments that they are using wine to get directx->opengl conversion, compatibility can't be better than wine anyway so it's unlikely that people will take a performance hit for compatibility that can't be much better.
disclaimer: I no next to nothing about graphics / virtual machines and not that much about security either tbh, so you are welcome to correct me...
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
thanks for sharing this. reason has long been a reason to keep me in windows only land. if I could get all my productivity stuff under vmware, it might not be so bad.
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Cool! After the umpteenth million time of not being able to build VMware Server under the latest kernel version, and this time NOT being able to find yet-another-vmware-any patch to fix it, I finally abandoned VMware (at least for personal use) and switched back to VirtualBox. Looks like I made the right decision right, just in time.
I'm still using VMware for server virtualization at work, but for running one of Uncle Bill's products on my desktop, it looks like VirtualBox is a better solution.
I will be interested in seeing how it works with USB. That's always been a bug-a-boo for me--getting USB devices to talk to the VM. This release sounds like they've cleaned up some things. I will be really interested in how it performs with some of my games that require 3D. (I'm talking like Guild Wars, not the latest releases.)
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That being said, I'm going to be interested in seeing how the 3D works in VirtualBox.....
Your Servant, B. Baggins
At least running on an OS X 10.5.7 host, 3D is definitely not yet stable - even OpenGL which is not listed as "experimental".
See here: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=19352
Other than that, VirtualBox is very polished in general. 3D is just not a feature that works yet, and should not be used in a production environment.
Facebook is the new AOL
I got DOSBox in VirtualBox, and a copy of X-Wing, but it is tricky reading the old floppies with modern hardware. With a bit of determination, I was able to insert a mini usb plug in under the sliding metal thingy on the disk, but the computer still can't work.
At first I thought it was the host OS lacking the correct drivers, but then I realised that floppies are much slower than usb drives, so they need to operate at a lower frequency. If I could just up the frequency, I could read the data!
Okay, here are the numbers. A high speed floppy would get around 500 Kbps tops and the USB transfer is around about 29.5 Mbps, so the floppy is around 1.7% the speed of the USB. So if I increase the speed of the USB connection by 59 times, I should get the USB to read the floppy correctly. Now a microwave oven works at 2.45 Ghz, so I figured that, seeing that that is ~83 times the speed of the USB, with a little bit of duct tape and some copper foil sheilding the usb cable, I could get the increase I needed in the floppy without over doing it.
So I put the floppy with the cable inserted in it and wrapped in copper foil and duct tape into the microwave, jammed the safety switch with a plastic spoon so I could run it with the door open (don't worry, I sat behind the microwave) and plugged it into the computer. Then I quickly turned the microwave on and read the data coming from the cable.
It didn't work first time, but that was because the USB wasn't acting like a drive, so the computer could "read" it. Unfortunately it was so fast that it blew up the usb port (I think, it wont read my thumb stick).
So then I opened up an old flash drive (32MB) which I have filled with 0x00 and carefully attached the chip to the disk surface with a spot of hot glue. When I plugged it in, the computer recognized it as "removable media", so I again started the microwave to spin up the disk frequency. This time there was more smoke, not just from the microwave (to be expected), but also from the usb port!!!
Can anyone help me with the right number of winds of duct tape needed to slow the floppy frequency from the 41.5Mbps I am getting to the 29.6 Mbps I need? I think the extra speed is causing overload, I am running out of USB ports and I just got a nosebleed. Also, does anyone have another copy of X-Wing? Mine is a bit worn :-(
I don't therefore I'm not.
I've been using VirtualBox to run some closed source software on my laptop. With WmWare, it barely worked. with VirtualBox, I was even able to make a cluster between the apps between the two virtual OSes (on same laptop), with decent performance. Setting up the network needed some tinkering, but after that it worked like a charm. Great piece of software ! I couldn't care less for the sound and 3D stuff as long as they don't break the core functionality
http://revj.sourceforge.net
I understand that the commercial efforts of Virtualbox and VMware get all the attention, but there is a completely Free alternative in the form of QEMU. Recently I have used its fork KVM, which uses hardware virtualization functions, to run XP under Gentoo, complete with USB passthrough.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
like my ability to easily transfer a virtualbox image from one computer to another, without dropping into some commandline tool.
I have tried many google tutorials using VBOXmanage, and and not been able to move my image from one machine to another, or clone it on the same computer without it giving an error message during bootup. So I don't look forward to the day my computer dies.
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
it's books on tape checked out from the library.
But there is still always a closest substitute. In this case, try pre-1923 or Creative Commons licensed books through a speech synthesizer.
I can give all kinds of examples, but one example I'll give are all the software that would assume the existance of necessary dynamic link libraries and even a compatible LINKER to use them! It pains me to know that all commercial linux software from even Loki Software had to go through so many revisions and wouldn't provide a static+dynamic binary on the package, or even consider a server-based command compiler to re-assemble the core program without going through the GNU side of Linux.
It would be great if the average distribution of Linux didn't squat on the command-line. Would be great if the graphics system was locked at the console onto a modular multi-console tablature implemented with a robust and orderly kit as DIRECTFB; that way all the calls in SDL, X11, libGGI et al could be properly routed without shell extensions right to framebuffer without hassle. Instead, we get wet feathers like XFREE86 and X.ORG.
Beam. Me. Up.