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VirtualBox 3.0 Beta Brings SMP, OpenGL 2.0

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  • VirtualBox 3.0 Beta Brings SMP, OpenGL 2.0

    Phoronix: VirtualBox 3.0 Beta Brings SMP, OpenGL 2.0

    Sun Microsystems has announced the first beta release of VirtualBox 3.0 Beta 1. The major additions to VirtualBox 3.0 so far is guest SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) support for up to 32 virtual CPUs, Windows guests now support Direct3D 8/9 applications and games, and there is now OpenGL 2.0 support for Windows, Linux, and Solaris guests.Guest SMP support has been a feature that's long been lacking from VirtualBox to provide better multi-core support, but it's finally arrived! To use the guest SMP support in VirtualBox, a processor with VT-x or AMD-V is required...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    How can Sun add D3D 8/9 support in such a sort time, when it have taken Wine 10+ years?

    This will be very interesting to see benchmarks of native Windows Quake in VirtualBox versus native Linux Quake!

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    • #3
      Originally posted by Louise View Post
      How can Sun add D3D 8/9 support in such a sort time, when it have taken Wine 10+ years?

      This will be very interesting to see benchmarks of native Windows Quake in VirtualBox versus native Linux Quake!
      They support OpenGL and use Wine's D3D libraries to convert DX calls to GL.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by srg_13 View Post
        They support OpenGL and use Wine's D3D libraries to convert DX calls to GL.
        I see.

        Very good to know, so there is no need to try games in VirtualBox, if they don't work in WINE.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by Louise View Post
          Very good to know, so there is no need to try games in VirtualBox, if they don't work in WINE.
          I wouldn't say that at all. There's a lot more to Wine than just 3D and quite often, it's the other stuff that it trips up on.

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          • #6
            Another interesting question is, if D3D games work in VirtualBox, how good will be the performance of such?

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            • #7
              For gaming I recommend Wine over VirtualBox. Sure there are things which could work better on VirtualBox (things like .NET if games use that or perhaps copy protections). Performance will be much lower compared to our wined3d code. The reason lies in the opengl implementation. Moving all opengl calls from virtualbox to the native opengl driver isn't efficient but virtualbox also needs to cache all data, so that after a 'pause' in virtualbox the program can continue as it was. Further some opengl calls which wined3d must make a lot (state switches like glEnable/glDisable calls) are not very great for virtualbox opengl as it requires resyncing which is relative slow.

              Compared to Wine performance will be lower but I have no idea how it will compare against Parallels and Vmware. I think it will be faster than Vmware because Vmware uses Microsoft DirectX including the microsoft device driver model and that might not be efficient performance wise. Not sure what parallels does these days, years ago they used wined3d.

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              • #8
                I hope that memory managment is better, it always problem for me in VirtualBox.

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                • #9
                  Is Guest OS's OpenGL support some sort of paravirtualization or what kind of system, does Virtualbox just passthru OpenGL commands to host OS OpenGL driver? Meaning how much penalty there is? Educated guesses?

                  Its much easier to work games under Virtualbox rather than Wine, regarding because all sorts of .net launchers, game updaters, etc.

                  I hope someone could benchmark differences between native, wine and virtualbox OpenGL and D3D performance...

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                  • #10
                    Wow, amazing updates here. I'll definitely like SMP for my 32bit compiling.

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