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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?"
"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.
You can also do this in VirtualBox, which is free and full featured (for non-commercial use.)
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.
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.
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.
Passing OpenGL calls through is easier, and has actually been done for a while now. Reimplementing DirectX is considerably harder, I think they used Wine code for a lot of that.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
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...
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.)
Your Servant, B. Baggins
I feel for you. I've spent the last couple of weeks trying to beat an Access 2000 VBA application into submission. I've got the current holes plugged, but next Monday I'm telling the guy I'm doing the work for that I'd rather recode it in Lisp than ever ever ever have to deal with VBA again. All VBA and VB ever did was allow people who had no business programming to create programs, and somehow so many of those programs ended up outlasting the original guys who made them.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
OpenGL already supports network transparency, you could potentially just use that existing functionality to deliver the GL calls over a local interface to the local host...
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Have to wonder how they figure USB passthrough "primarily targets enterprise customers" though...
[citation needed]
Do modern consumer chipsets already implement IOMMUs or are you talking about server hardware?