VMware's Virtual GPU Driver Is Running Fast

Kicking things off with Nexuiz at 1600 x 1200, running VMware Player 4.0.2 with the Ubuntu 12.04 guest caused the game's frame-rate to drop by about 30%. While there was about 30% overhead for this OpenGL test with the NVIDIA graphics on the host, VMware did much better than Oracle VM VirtualBox on the same system. VMware's graphics stack was 2.5x faster than VirtualBox.

Both VMware and VirtualBox took a big hit in frame-rate when running the CPU-bound OpenArena game, but the VMware solution still was much faster. In fact, VMware's frame-rate was nearly five times faster than Oracle's virtualization solution!

While the Lightsmark rendering was broken with VMware, it churned out just fewer than 60 FPS at 800 x 600.