VirtualBox 3.0 Beta Brings SMP, OpenGL 2.0

[phoronix]

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...

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

[Louise]

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!

[srg_13]

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.

[Louise]

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.

[Chewi]

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.

[M1AU]

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

[Thunderbird]

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.

[Mazur]

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

[ppanula]

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...

[Vadi]

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

[BlackStar]

Very exciting news! SMP and OpenGL 2.0 support just about double the value of VirtualBox for graphics programming.

VBox uses OpenGL passthru, which has a measurable performance penalty. Unfortunately, it doesn't really make sense to benchmark the current version (which only support GL 1.5). Once VBox 3 is out, I will do some extensive performance tests - I don't expect it to be a speed demon, but I hope it will be usable for general graphics programming.

[whizse]

Me, I'm still dreaming about a good GTK+ based GUI for VB. :)

[Tares]

yay, Trickster Online works :D although dxdiag says that DX7/8 is broken, only DX9 test was completed.

[hax0r]

Hopefully it will be easier to install, setting up network interfaces are flipping PITA, much like fixing alsa's config to get e.g. 5.1 channels because we're still in 1990.

[wswartzendruber]

Me, I'm still dreaming about a good GTK+ based GUI for VB. :)
Get Qt 4.5 and tell it to use QGtkStyle.

[Yfrwlf]

"Sun Microsystems has announced the first beta release of VirtualBox 3.0 Beta 1."

Wow, so it's VirtualBox 3.0 Beta 1 Beta 1 then? Now THAT is beta software.

Sorry, couldn't resist. ^^

[RealNC]

Hmm. Does VMWare support 3D in Linux at all?

[deanjo]

Hmm. Does VMWare support 3D in Linux at all?

Yes, OGL 2.1 and DirectX 9c. Latest betas even support ALSA finally.

[rotarychainsaw]

Can normal people download this from somewhere? I don't mind running beta since I don't do anything important...

nevermind, I see you actually have to look at the mailing list link to get the DL though it is not on the VB website.

[wswartzendruber]

Beta 2 is out: http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/3.0.0_BETA2/