Can 3D Graphics be Achieved on Virtualization?

The question is no longer “can virtualization support 3D graphics?”, the real question is – when?

An interesting video recently showed up on youtube, and oddly enough, the video was showcasing 3D graphics acceleration on VMware’s Mac OS X beta virtualization platform, Fusion. And as expected, the video has generated a lot of buzz in the virtualization arena, as gaming fans and 3D application vendors have been salivating over the opportunity to run these types of applications within a virtual machine environment for quite some time.

After watching the video (which by the way is not being claimed by VMware marketing – but being billed as an unknown amateur video), you can clearly see where 3D acceleration is becoming possible. Granted, the 3D gaming taking place in the video was from some of the older generation technologies, but, we can see where this beta is taking us and I was quite pleased to see the progress being made.

For clarification of the video, VMware had the following to say on their official blog site:

• This has been an “experimental feature” of our product line since Workstation 5.0, released almost 2 years ago.

• It supports DirectX 8.1 with no shading. The Fusion tech lead said that they are working on 9 and 10.

• You can turn it on right now in Workstation in your vmx file with mks.enable3d = TRUE.

• Although the video shows it in a window, it will work in full screen mode just fine.

• In the Fusion beta discussion forums, it was disclosed that this feature will be turned on in a future beta. Fusion’s engine is a port of the Workstation/Player/Server family.

So again, the question comes back to timing? When? I haven’t seen anything from VMware yet as to when this will happen, but since this is still in a beta, I would assume there is still much needed time for proper QA.

Parallels, however, continues to insist that 3D graphic acceleration is going to be in their next major beta release. When I spoke with Ben Rudolph of Parallels many months ago, this feature seemed high on their list as it would certainly help elevate Parallel’s virtualization game. Which company will get 3D acceleration in a virtual machine to market first? Stay tuned.