3D Acceleration Support

[dagurasu]

but opengl is usefull for solidworks for exemple, for some video viewer, ...

Very truee, but has anyone actually tested this? I have. Using nvidia beta drivers for 9600M GT. Host is sabayon linux (tried with and without compiz on), Guest is XP Pro. When I turn on 3d Acceleralation, solidworks gets faster, and the bits that are sort of working are smoother, but it's all a mess. Usually the screen is a collage of bits, some of which are supposed to be showing, usually those near the mouse, and some which are not. Some video object/bufferes/pixmaps or whatever they are appear spontaneously, things like a pop up menu that I used a minute ago, but which does not still exist, pops in an out of view. The object I'm drawing may show if I mouse over it, but in a little square and the background around the square may be the default background that showed before I opened a part window. It's a disaster.

Maybe some xorg settings can fix this? Maybe I should have installed windows after enabling 3d? (If so I hope solidworks doesn't get tired of me re-registering eventually)

[Vore]

Just tested Virtualbox Guest running Windows 7 with Google Earth running in OpenGL mode. Works like a champ.

[krawetko]

When will be added 3d support for Linux so I can run Compiz on Ubuntu guest?

[TerryE]

It's "in the works", but the dev team haven't made any announcements yet.

[Bob_Robertson]

Hi. VB 2.1.2, Windows XP guest, Linux host with 3d acceleration.

This is a pre-existing install, which I updated to 2.1.2 and selected "3d Acceleration Enabled". Yet DirectX will not initialize.

Is there some internal (Windows) configuration I need to do other than successful Guest Additions?

[Sasquatch]

Hi. VB 2.1.2, Windows XP guest, Linux host with 3d acceleration.

This is a pre-existing install, which I updated to 2.1.2 and selected "3d Acceleration Enabled". Yet DirectX will not initialize.

Is there some internal (Windows) configuration I need to do other than successful Guest Additions?

If you read things a bit better, you would know that only OpenGL is supported, not DirectX.

[Bob_Robertson]

If you read things a bit better, you would know that only OpenGL is supported, not DirectX.

While OpenGL had been specifically mentioned, I didn't find any reference to DirectX.

Thank you. Now I know that the OpenGL references are specific to Windows guests, also not explicit in recent postings dated after I knew that 2.1.2 was available.

How about, "If you wrote things better, I wouldn't have to ask such questions."

[Sasquatch]

I didn't 'write' anything. I'm not a Sun employee, just a volunteer managing the forums here.

Don't expect things to work if they aren't mentioned. If they say 'experimental 3D through OpenGL', it doesn't suddenly mean it's also DirectX .

[Bob_Robertson]

If they say 'experimental 3D through OpenGL', it doesn't suddenly mean it's also DirectX .

And if that is what I had found, prior to asking, I wouldn't have asked.

All I'd found prior to asking was "3D acceleration" and comments like "OpenGL Works for me".

It's not surprising that no one mentioned DirectX, but I wasn't looking for OpenGL. So I asked about what had not been mentioned.

I've noted that you do provide vast quantities of help here, which is very kind of you. Kudos, pats on back, etc. Wish I knew so much about the product, then I wouldn't have to ask questions.

[Sasquatch]

... I've noted that you do provide vast quantities of help here, which is very kind of you. Kudos, pats on back, etc. Wish I knew so much about the product, then I wouldn't have to ask questions.

Thanks . It might be also wise to read the manual. It's stated there, not explicitly in the changelog.

Your knowledge will come in due time.

[IAmBill]

If they say 'experimental 3D through OpenGL', it doesn't suddenly mean it's also DirectX .

And if that is what I had found, prior to asking, I wouldn't have asked.

All I'd found prior to asking was "3D acceleration" and comments like "OpenGL Works for me".

It's not surprising that no one mentioned DirectX, but I wasn't looking for OpenGL. So I asked about what had not been mentioned.

I've noted that you do provide vast quantities of help here, which is very kind of you. Kudos, pats on back, etc. Wish I knew so much about the product, then I wouldn't have to ask questions.

As said, the user manual and change-log is pretty explicit on how the 3D acceleration works and what it works for. You lack of experience tends to be in forums rather than visualization software. What you are and are not seeing in forums is not a good basis on what a product can do... it's also not the fault of the coders that nobody chose to mention an API that they explicitly stated was not implemented in the latest version.

Anyway... no big deal. Just don't point fingers at people before you know who they are and how they relate to your problem.

[Technologov]

There is a very interesting ongoing effort to enable Direct3D through WineD3D:
http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/2940

-Technologov

[ajmas]

Technologov: I gave the WineD3D software a go, though it doesn't seem mature enough to run Google Earth in D3D. OpenGL works, though I am getting to redraw issues when using Google Earth in OpenGL mode.

My environment: VB 2.1.4, WinXP SP3 guest, MacOS X 10.5 host

[myxiplx]

Does anybody know if Sun are thinking about adding PCI Express virtualisation? This seems to have been talked about a lot in various places - the Xen forums have some mention of it for years now, and it's been discussed here too.

The idea is to allow the guest to take control of one PCI Express slot, in much the same way you can mount a CD-ROM drive, or USB device now. Since modern motherboards have multiple PCIe slots, this would let you fit one graphics card for the host, and another for your guest. You can then install native graphics drivers in your guest for full 3D support. It would seem a lot simpler than trying to write 3D support from scratch to work with any host, and has the added benefit that virtual PCIe support could work for many types of hardware - high performance storage drivers, 10GbE NICs, Infiniband, etc...

Now, there is still the issue of where this outputs - at the simplest level, you could just run two monitors. However a neater solution might be for virtualbox to add a 'mirror driver'. This is the solution used by many remote control programs; they add a graphics driver to capture the output from your graphics card, which they can then stream over the network. If virtualbox had a mirror driver, you could use the full 3D capabilities of a card in the guest, and still stream the output back to the virtualbox client, allowing it to be displayed by the host.

In fact, virtualbox already supports RDP at the server level, so this mirror driver would appear to fit in to the architecture well. The mirror driver could do the job of providing the graphics stream to the RDP server, and the VirtualBox GUI on the host would just connect using RDP. That would also give you the benefit of full 3D support even for remote connections.

If this could be done, it would mean that at work we could run full blown CAD clients within VirtualBox, something that we can't do with any competing product at this point in time.

It also means that at home, I could run a cheap graphics card for my Linux host, with my faster card reserved for my Windows guest, allowing me to run my games at nearly full speed.

[TerryE]

Actually the VBox architecture already has a Pluggable Device Manager (PDM). What this allows developers to do is to all virtual devices of their own to the virtual hardware. VBox uses this for example to plug the various types of virtual display (RDP, SDL, ...) into the VM. There would be nothing to stop a community developer doing what you suggest. However support a generic PCIe card would AFAIK be quite a bit more work than a specific one. The sun team have already shown some commitment to developing 3D capability, but their immediate priority is generic OpenGL and DirectX support. I suspect that your scenario is a niche given that you would require 2 PCIe slot M/B and 2 monitors to implement what you suggest. Therefore IMHO, any development of this would need to come from the community.