Using VM for gaming?

[Hicks12]

Is it possible? I had an idea of using a virtual machine to play windows games and have my pc boot with linux instead. So the question.... is gaming possible and if so, is there a performance drop?. New to using VM so if this is dumb, sorry .

[Agent]

Most VM's emulate a basic graphics card and don't get direct hardware access. In most cases this means zero 3D acceleration, although I believe progress in this area is slowly being made.

So for your generic run of the mill Unreal / Source based game? No. Forget it.

[Hicks12]

Most VM's emulate a basic graphics card and don't get direct hardware access. In most cases this means zero 3D acceleration, although I believe progress in this area is slowly being made.

So for your generic run of the mill Unreal / Source based game? No. Forget it.

Damn, thought there was going to be something stopping this.

Any other options other than dual booting linux+windows?.

[Agent]

At the risk of stating the obvious, but have you tried WINE?

[Hicks12]

Ah, i totally forgot about Wine. There was a emulator for mac/linux that was free a bit ago and i did get it but forgot about it so will try and find that and give it ago(along with wine).
Cheers for the help.

[aidanjt]

VMware has support for Direct3D acceleration, VirtualBox has support for OpenGL acceleration. But neither has steller performance, so it'll be quite some time before you play Crysis in a VM. In fact, with my testing of VMware, it was hardly able to accelerate Max Payne (an olddd game) at playable framerates. Stick with Wine for performance.

[Blastuk]

Accelerated 3-D Limitations

Experimental support for Direct3D applies only to Windows 2000 and Windows XP guests, on hosts running Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Linux.

Experimental support has the following limitations:
Workstation accelerates DirectX 8 applications, and DirectX 9 applications that use only the subset of DirectX 8.
Support for 3-D applications is not optimized for performance.
OpenGL applications run in software emulation mode.

Not all aspects of 3-D acceleration are enabled. The following 3-D features are not accelerated:
Pixel and vertex shaders
Multiple vertex streams
Hardware bump-mapping, environment mapping
Projected textures
Textures with one, three, or four dimensions

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/do...sound_d3d.html

simple answer is don't bother

[aidanjt]

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/do...sound_d3d.html

simple answer is don't bother

That's outdated by a major release version:

Support for applications that use DirectX 9 accelerated graphics applies only to Windows XP guests, on hosts running Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Linux.
This feature currently has the following restrictions:
• Workstation now offers support for DirectX games and applications with DirectX versions 9 and lower.
• Support for 3-D applications is not optimized for performance.
• OpenGL applications run in software emulation mode.
• You cannot use the record/replay feature to record a 3-D application.

Search for 'direct3d' from here: http://pubs.vmware.com/ws65_ace25/ww...tml/wwhelp.htm

[Moby-Dick]

I run over 700 vm's but none of them on graphic intensive applications.

I did get steam to work on my ubuntu install but seemed to be in very low res - was easier to run vista 64 bit

[-iceblade^]

never had much success with my many Linux Mint installs, virtualised or not and not much success with WINE either.

i suggest you don't bother, wait for updates.