3D in virtual machines

Question

What VMs can be used for 3D programming?

I was disappointed to find out that VMware products only have experimental support and even that only for 2D acceleration.

Answer 1

Parallels for the Mac has 3D support for DirectX and OpenGL. I have Parallels on my mac at home, and as a user, I can say it works fairly well. I haven't done any 3D development with it, though.

Answer 2

Virtualization is still fairly new, and 3D graphics isn't the most important feature in server room, which has been driving adoption. Give it 5 years. By then all this experimental stuff will have had time to mature in both performance and stability. In the mean-time, there's not much out there.

Answer 3

The current beta of VMware Workstation 6.5 supports 3D acceleration on a limited but usable scale.

I was able to get both XNA Pong and XNA Racing Game to run and work pretty well. The performance isn't perfect, but it is definitely good enough to test if the game will run on a non-dev system without having to use a separate PC. 3D acceleration is only supported on a guest XP machine, but a variety of host OSes are supported. I am running Vista x64 without issue.

The VMware Workstation 6.5 is free to try and can be gotten here:

Workstation 6.5 Beta Program

Answer 4

Might be worth a look at VMGL - currently only on Linux, but hopefully a Windows version soon. It's an open source thing you can find here.

Answer 5

One thing to keep in mind is that if you're using Parallels or VMWare under Mac OS X or Linux to run Windows, you're not going to be getting the same class of acceleration as running directly on the hardware for Direct3D applications. This is because all of the calls basically have to be translated on the fly from Direct3D to OpenGL, since Mac OS X and Linux know nothing about Direct3D.