VirtualBox 2.1.0, released today (see the changelog), does OpenGL 3D acceleration, which is something I have been hanging out for for a very long time. It doesn’t yet do Direct3D acceleration, but OpenGL is sufficient to run many popular games, namely ones based on the id Tech 3 (Quake III Arena, Jedi Knight II, Jedi Academy, Alice, etc.), Half-Life, or Source engine.
The 3D acceleration works with a Windows guest (with guest additions installed), and works on any host operating system (including Linux).
The above screenshot shows me running Quake III Arena in Windows XP in VirtualBox 2.1.0 in Gentoo, which is running at 52fps.
It is quite ironic that VirtualBox only supports OpenGL acceleration. VMware has had 3D acceleration for a while now, but they have only supported Direct3D, not OpenGL. So I suppose in the meantime, you can use VirtualBox for OpenGL games, and VMware for Direct3D games. Everybody’s happy!
Update: I filed a bug report in the VirtualBox bug tracker saying that WineD3D should be used to achieve Direct3D acceleration.
i was verry happy when i seen the release on virtualbox 2.1.0 (the change log) , but games in virtualbox?… for what? there is wine…. and aaa ye…. a dual boot for games… if u install “winblows“ in a wm, why not in a dual boot?….. but still…. win sucks…. linux rules:)
Some things simply do not work properly in Wine, and need the genuine operating system to run on top of. That’s where virtualisation can help.
[...] VirtualBox 2.1.0 does OpenGL 3D acceleration [...]
and I think a dual boot is a waste of a good partition
Indeed. I hate partitioning.
Haha I saw that when I downloaded Virtualbox… it was awesome. Maybe we could get WINE to make a special version for Windows that just supported OpenGL to Direct3D… that would be awesome
.
And Vista still rates VBox as a 1 for Graphics… I think it only tests Direct3D (sorry if that’s a duh…. lol)
You can already run GL games on Direct3d only systems. You need GLDirect. I have used it on my UMPC, and it has great performance. It’s free BTW·
http://majorgeeks.com/GLDirect_d381.html
Shame VirtualBox is not the one doing D3D, as I prefer it to VMware.
No no no. This is about running Direct3D applications on OpenGL systems. Not the other way around.
It’s true, WineD3D can provide Direct3D support on an otherwise OpenGL-only VirtualBox. People reading this might be interested in my WineD3D builds:
http://aybabtu.com/rmh/wined3d/
which are regularly updated from official releases. These are known to work (to some extent) on VirtualBox. See http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/2940
Hi Jeremy, how did you get it to work. What videocard does your system detect when you have 3D acceleration enabled? I have it enabled but Windows XP still only detects a ‘VGA Compatible’ videocard. When I run BZFlag, it doesn’t detect any OpenGL hardware.
I’m running Windows XP under Ubuntu 8.10 in VirtualBox 2.1.4
Well that’s unrelated to 3D acceleration. Go into Device Manager, and right-click on the video card and hit Uninstall. Then reboot.
Tried that but it keeps only detecting a generic VGA card. Did you set the video memory in VirtualBox to the memory size of your physical video card? My physical video card has 512MB memory but in VirtualBox the maximum I can set it to is 128MB.
No, it shouldn’t matter what the video memory is set to. In fact, I never bother to bump it above the default of 12MB.
One other thing you can try is insert the VirtualBox Guest Additions disc in the drive, then right-click on the video card, hit Update Driver, and go through the manual steps, and tell it to look for the driver in the right folder on the Guest Additions disc. Hopefully it should pick it up.
Ok, I got it working! I needed to install the Guest Additions. At first I couldn’t find where these Guest Additions were, but I later found out they are in the VirtualBox menu (Devices->Install Guest Additions).
BZFlag still isn’t working flawlessly, though. Some menu items are still garbled. Anyone having the same problem?
What do you need to run BZFlag in VBox for?
You compile it for most systems.
Heh. Didn’t even occur to me. It’s even pre-compiled for Ubuntu, which BigPilot is running. (
apt-get install bzflag)>>BigPilot
“OPENGL Support & Direct3D Support” concerning VMware & VirtualBox is “OPENGL emulation & Direct3D emulation.
The hardware that doesn’t exist is only constructed in a virtual space by using a main ”hostOS” memory space and existing graphic hardware.
Therefore, the RAM of “Video card” of host OS are 512MB, 1024MB, but it is quite unrelated.
3D accelarator function of VMWare&VirtualBox only outputs it from software to existing OPEN-GL. It doesn’t access the video card directly.