VMware's New Graphics Architecture Is Shaping Up

[phoronix]

Phoronix: VMware's New Graphics Architecture Is Shaping Up

VMware's overhauled Linux graphics driver stack is shaping up and coming together nicely in time for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which will allow for 2D/3D guest acceleration within virtualized guest machines...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA0MzE

[ChrisXY]

Yay, my thread.

I ran unigine sanctuary and was deeply impressed.

A quick test of xonotic and openarena showed good performance, but the mouse didn't behave well ingame. (Maybe better with mouse.vusb.enable = "TRUE"?)
Warcraft 3 in wine is a bit jerky, but works.

So we are actually getting to the point where gaming in VMs works... But of course we would have it rather the other way around: Gaming in a windows vm on linux instead of gaming in a linux vm on windows.

[khogan]

Glad to see you are having some fun ChrisXY. I work on the support team for desktop products at VMware and just started playing around with the driver as well. openSUSE 12.1 works well for anyone that wants to try it, you will get the GNOME 3 experience. I made a post on the VMware communities in the workstation section on what needs to be done.

For your mouse issues some things you may want to try

add/modify these lines in the vmx

usb:0.deviceType = "mouse"
usb:0.present = "FALSE"
mouse.vusb.enable = "FALSE"

Another thing to try is under Edit > Preferences > Input set the Optimize for games option to Always.

Here is a run of Sanctuary on my macbook in Fusion. Unfortunately Heaven will not run yet:

System Information

Hardware:
Processor: Intel Core i7-2720QM @ 2.20GHz (1 Core), Motherboard: Intel 440BX, Chipset: Intel 440BX/ZX/DX, Memory: 2048MB, Disk: 32GB VMware Virtual S, Graphics: VMware SVGA II, Audio: Ensoniq ES1371, Network: AMD 79c970

Software:
OS: SUSE LINUX 12.1, Kernel: 3.1.0-1.2-default (i686), Desktop: GNOME Shell 3.2.1, Display Server: X Server 1.10.4, Display Driver: vmware 11.99.901, OpenGL: 2.1 Mesa 8.0-devel (git-faa90ab) Gallium 0.4, Compiler: GCC 4.6, File-System: ext4, Screen Resolution: 1680x1050, System Layer: VMware

Would you like to save these test results (Y/n): n

Estimated Run-Time: 12 Minutes

Unigine Sanctuary 2.3:
pts/unigine-sanctuary-1.5.1 [Resolution: 800 x 600]
Test 1 of 1
Estimated Trial Run Count: 3
Estimated Time To Completion: 12 Minutes
Started Run 1 @ 12:37:28
Started Run 2 @ 12:40:45
Started Run 3 @ 12:44:05 [Std. Dev: 1.25%]

Test Results:
29.0837
29.6661
28.992

Average: 29.25 Frames Per Second

[ChrisXY]

Sorry, didn't see your answer...

Unigine Heaven has a problem natively on radeon for me too. Maybe it's a mesa problem? I will soon test with optimizations on -O1 because I had a problem with lib32 mesa that wine only works with -O1 and not with -O2 since llvm 3.0.

 ~ % unigine-heaven
Fullscreen? Please enter 1 or 0. (1 = yes, 0 = no)
0
Video width? e.g. 1024

Video height? e.g. 768

Engine::init(): can't create log file
Loading "/opt/unigine-heaven/bin/../data/heaven_2.5.cfg"...
Engine::init(): clear video settings for "Gallium 0.4 on AMD REDWOOD 2.1 Mesa 8.0-devel (git-9783bba)"
Loading "libGL.so.1"...
Loading "libopenal.so.1"...
Set 640x480 windowed video mode
X Error of failed request:  BadRequest (invalid request code or no such operation)
  Major opcode of failed request:  154 (GLX)
  Minor opcode of failed request:  34 ()
  Serial number of failed request:  46
  Current serial number in output stream:  4

I will also try the mouse settings, but probably I'll wait for the weekend because I only boot windows on weekends for playing and prefer working with my full RAM during the week.
I may mention again that I "only" use the VMWare player, so not even the commercial product.

[ChrisXY]

So if people only read this thread and not the others: the problem with unigine heaven is indeed a problem of unigine heaven and it has been fixed. But the update is not yet released...

The settings

usb:0.deviceType = "mouse"
usb:0.present = "FALSE"
mouse.vusb.enable = "FALSE"

in the vmx file do not help with the mouse in games that "warp" the mouse, at least in openarena, and at least not in the vmware player. I don't have workstation to test the optimize for games settings but maybe I will try that sometime..