Virtualbox 3.0 Announces OpenGL/Direct3D Support 161
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?"
Re:Finally? (Score:3, Informative)
You could also do this using VMware player, which is free.
Re:I wouldn't count on it (Score:2, Informative)
i am able to play sof2 fullscreen with high specs on my xp virtualmachine, running in gentoo. 3d accel works great. still iffed about starcraft not stretching to screen-size though -_____-
Re:Vmware (Score:1, Informative)
it doesn't work on my ATI card (older X1900) under Linux with a Vista 32-bit guest under a 64-bit host with no hardware virt. It technically speeds things up a little, but crashes my display manager under linux after a while.
Re:Vmware (Score:3, Informative)
It only works on Windows guests. Only DirectX is supported, not OpenGL.
Re:Vmware (Score:5, Informative)
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 [vmware.com] 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.
Re:Virtual box (Score:4, Informative)
.. 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.
If you can figure out how to browse the *whole* network in Windows, which IIRC isn't immediately obvious, you can do it in the GUI (and in fact don't even need to map a drive - just save shortcut.) Right clicking on network neighbourhood and saying "explore" is the trick, I think. Alongside the "Microsoft Windows Network" object there's a "VirtualBox Shared Folders" which contains all the shared folders.
But you're right, I wouldn't have thought it was that hard to make the appropriate window pop open automagically.
Re:Does this even matter? (Score:3, Informative)
That's why the Direct3D bit is a big deal. Direct3D is the 3D part of DirectX.
Re:Finally? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:why virtual ? (Score:1, Informative)
Because AFAIK the address space is only virtualized for CPU programs. You cannot do address space translation for other hardware that does DMA. That's why the VMs offer virtual devices, not the real ones.
Finally? I've been doing that in VMware for ages (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Finally? (Score:5, Informative)
The latter. See here [virtualbox.org], where they say
The VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE) is the one that has been released under the GPL and comes with complete source code. It is functionally equivalent to the full VirtualBox package, except for a few features that primarily target enterprise customers. This gives us a chance to generate revenue to fund further development of VirtualBox. [emphasis mine]
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:To hell with OpenGL and Direct3D (Score:3, Informative)
"Odd protocols, like GRE?" .. not a network guy, are you? Should I use a standardized, widely implemented protocol like GRE, or a single-implementation solution like OpenVPN. Don't get me wrong, I love OpenVPN and thing those guys have a fantastic cross-platform solution ... but GRE isn't exactly an "odd protocol".
Hmmm
Re:I wouldn't count on it (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I wouldn't count on it (Score:2, Informative)
Tried Quake Live in an XP VM on my Mac. It ran slowly, mouse didn't work at all, and keyboard response was piss poor.
So yeah, seems like it ain't happening for now. Virtualbox is really nice though; I've been using it for a year and a half now and I love it.
Re:Wine and Games (Score:3, Informative)