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3D Acceleration in virtualization

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First post, by DosFreak

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Found this thread with some interesting links:

http://www.virtualbox.org/discussion/1/615

3D Acceleration Support and why it wont happen anytime soon […]
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3D Acceleration Support and why it wont happen anytime soon

since there are many questions - so I would like to write : "why there won't be a 3D support anytime soon"

The problem:

To get a 3D support, you have to have a virtual 3D hardware and several drivers - 1 for OpenGL and 1 for Direct3D.

Possible ways to get there:

a. Emulate a real 3D card such as GeForce? - it solves the drivers problem automatically - but this card is closed-source hardware, so we can't simply emulate it, + it will be damn slow.

This is very very difficult to do technically, so probably, it won't happen.

b. Use virtualized hardware, such as Virtualbox 3D accelerator - and write 3D drivers for that one. Remember - both OpenGL and Direct3D drivers are needed for several guest OSes.

The OpenGL problem can be resolved theoretically easier - we could run virtualized-Mesa3D on top of host's OpenGL and we are done. The DirectX problem is much more difficult - we will have to translate DirectX instructions into OpenGL instructions, like Wine does - but the problem with Wine is that it's too buggy and many games won't run. So it must be debugged along the way.

This will allow to reach 99% of native speed, so this is very fast solution.

solution b is Very Difficult task as well, but more realistic than a.

Innotek also don't see the need to work on 3D virtualization. VMware were working on it since about 2005, and already have BETA product that supports 3D, called VMware Fusion.

Innotek seems no to have any plans to even start such a project, so my take is that it won't happen at least until 2010... (for stable D3D+OpenGL support)

Perhaps a community has to step-in and try to work with Mesa3D guys to build such a 3D virtualization layer.

Update: The community pointed me to some interesting ongoing projects.

OK, so let's sum up all the known projects:

1. VMGL

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~andreslc/xen-gl/

2. Qemu-patch

http://qemu-forum.ipi.fi/viewtopic.php?t=2984

3. Wine

http://www.winehq.com

4. DirectX OpenGL Wrapper

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dxglwrap

and lets sum the question:

Are those totally separate projects, or they have any relationships ?

--

-Alexey Eremenko "Technologov"
Fenix*NBK*
04/08/07 06:06:51

PDF presentation of VMGL: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~andreslc/publicati … t-2007/vmgl.pdf

heh. Check out the Mesa scores....

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Reply 1 of 5, by dh4rm4

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The Moka5 guys have a 3D acceleration beta driver available for VMWare hosted virtualised Linux and Windows XP installations with Vista acceleration including Aqua on the horizon. 3D acceleration certainly is possible in virtualised environments - we use it in the most common of emulators like MAME, ePSXe and Chankast.

Reply 2 of 5, by ADDiCT

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MAME doesn't use 3d acceleration, sadly. It uses the Direct3D API to stretch images with hardware, that's it. I wish they would make use of Direct3D (or OpenGL) for acceleration, as that would allow more recent games to run at playable speed on "normal" PC's.

In ePSXe (and other PSX or N64 emus), acceleration functions are provided by the gfx plugins, not the emulator itself (although i guess the emulator has to have some sort of support for that - maybe a mapping of functions or something similar - for that to work). Most of the plugins are in their nth version, so the development came a long way.

Did anyone try a VMWare beta with 3D acceleration support? I wonder how fast that could be...

Reply 3 of 5, by laxdragon

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I tried the VMWare Fusion beta on MacOS. It worked, but the performance was horrible. That and many things like bump mapping did not work.

From what I hear, most if this is due to the opengl provided in OSX not being very complete.

laxDRAGON.com | My Game Collection | My Computers | YouTube

Reply 4 of 5, by dh4rm4

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Moka 5:-

Virtual Machine 3D Acceleration in VMWARE hosted Windows XP sessions

"You may have seen our demos of 3D games running inside LivePCs at CES...well, now you can do it too. It will only let you run Direct3D 8 and 9 games/programs inside a LivePC. "

known issues
------------
1) cpu load compared to non-virtualized case is higher
2) google earth doesn't work properly on ati cards
3) vmware workstation 6.0 beta is not supported
4) multiple monitors result in errant behavior, you only can get 3d support on your primary monitor (the one with the start menu on it)
5) guest 3d windows may overwrite host windows
6) vm's with scroll bars on the viewer window will not work properly.
7) fullscreen requires vmware tools to be installed so that guest resizing will take effect.
8) mouse motion malfunctions if directinput relative mode is required (first person shooters for example). this can be fixed by configuring the livepc and adding a line to the vmx text
vmmouse.present = "FALSE"
now your mouse may cuts a little square out of the image because mouse overlays are disabled...

http://www.moka5.com/node/536

Reply 5 of 5, by smoketetsu

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laxdragon wrote:

I tried the VMWare Fusion beta on MacOS. It worked, but the performance was horrible. That and many things like bump mapping did not work.

From what I hear, most if this is due to the opengl provided in OSX not being very complete.

Where did you get this information? That can't be true. I have played for example all the Doom 3 engine games released so far on my Mac and all the features including bump map\normal mapping work and well I might add. The OpenGL in OS X may need work but it's not THAT bad! In fact it seems to be getting faster all the time and I hear there is going to be even more improvements in Leopard. It seems more likely that the OpenGL in VMWare is the one that is incomplete. You have to also realize (I took a look at your site) that integrated graphics aren't very good for 3D either.

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