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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?"
I remember VMware implementing this several months ago. It was experimental, I don't know about it's status right now.
Ummm... actually, it's been a feature in VMWare for several years... It was experimental in VMWare 5.0 but it has been standard in the past three major releases: 5.5, 6.0 and 6.5. FWIW, VMWare tends to do major updates in 0.5 increments and you can go from 5.0->5.5 and 6.0->6.5 for free... It's a nice way for only paying for half your major upgrades. Minor upgrades are a smaller decimal value added on (i.e. 5.51, 5.52, etc) and those are always free.
The free to use 'personal user end license' does actually allow you to use VirtualBox in a commercial environment, as long as you install it and use it yourself. Check out their FAQ at http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ If you can live without USB connectivity then the GPL version is also pretty fully featured, and their 'seemless' mode is really really cool.
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.
However at this point, 3D VMs seem to be an experimental playtoy, not something that can be used for serious gaming.
It makes no sense to lump OpenGL and Direct3D together as "3D" when you're talking about VirtualBix, since they are implemented in very different ways.
VirtualBox OpenGL is basically just as pass-thru to the host driver. The guest box additions includes a virtual OpenGL driver that just passes the commands thru to the the host and the real driver. There must be some performance hit, but the approach seems simple enough.
VirtualBox Direct3D is implemented using the WINE driver that converts Direct3D calls into OpenGL which then get tunneled through to the host OpenGL driver as in the OpenGL case. VirtuaBox Direct3D should therefore be similar in functionality to that in WINE. One upside to the approach is that you don't need a Windows host to have D3D guest aceleration.