[CoLoCo] virtualization question

[Michael "TheZorch" Haney]

David L. Willson wrote:
> OK, you virtualization experts, you tryers of everything,
> Is ~any~ virtualization product getting close to letting me play games at speed?  Even
> half-speed?  In other words, is anything letting the hosted app/machine get to the
> directx/glx/acceleration features of the video card?
>   
Two VMs can do that at the moment.  VMware Fusion and Parallels, both 
support up-to Direct X 8 (still working on DX9 support) and full Open 
GL.  Saw a video of Team Fortress 2 running in Parallels on the Mac at 
full speed without any loss of graphical features.  Parallels is also 
now available for Linux.  There is a video on Youtube with a 
demonstration of VMware Fusion running a DX8 game by WMware at some 
conference.  I don't know if it was the GDC or not.  The game was Tony 
Hawk's Pro Skater which is a DX8 game.

I do know for a fact that World of Warcraft runs in both Parallels and 
VMware Fusion and Wine which is also true of Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 
2, Doom 3 and Unreal Tournament 2k4 (set to OpenGL rather than DX).

I've been noticing a slow trend in the game industry, a paradyne shift 
you might call it from total reliance on Direct X to support of OpenGL 
and OpenAL.  This is probably because of Vista and DX10 which broke 
backward compatibility beyond DX9.  That's right, backward compatibility 
in DX10 is software emulated and not a part of the API as it is in 
DX9.0c.  Also OpenGL is software emulated in DX10 since Vista doesn't 
have native OpenGL drivers.  However, if you have an nVidia card they 
supply native Vista OpenGL drivers for you.  OpenAL is picking up steam 
also because Microsoft in their infinite "cluelessness" removed 
DirectSound3D from Direct X 10.  This is a required component for 
hardware accelerated 3D audio in games, and is a required component for 
games which support Creative's EAX.  So, for their more high-end sound 
cards Creative is including a DirectSound3D to OpenAL Wrapper with their 
drivers.  If you don't have one of these high-end X-Fi cards you're shit 
out of luck.  So you can see why the gaming industry is a tad bit upset 
with Microsoft.


-- 
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
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