Desktop Virtualization - Win on Linux 3D performance

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Deleted member 143938

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I just had a thought. I play games here and there, but not a whole lot, mostly TF2.
I had bad performance with every game in WINE and I don't expect TF2 to be any different.

So what if you installed a WinXP virtual machine over your Linux installation? First of all, is 3D acceleration supported in Win VM over Linux? If so, would there be a more than 20 percent performance loss?

Also, is it worthwhile to install a VM OS over your primary OS for general desktop usage at all?

Reason I ask is because I have Vista installed right now and would like to mess around with Linux more, but I don't have a laptop with me right now and no way am I printing 5 million manual pages, so installing Linux through VM while having access to the interwebs would be nice.

Also I read that virtual machines retain their full performance as if they were running natively. I have a REAL tough time believing this. Granted I've never messed around with VM's but this is just unbelievable to me.
 
3D acel from within the guest OS is poor. Parallels and VMware have it kinda BUT DX8 level-ish and not that fast

IF you really want to game and yr games don't run in WINE (although TF2 & source games are suppost to run really well in WINE) and you still want to tinker with linux then the best bet is still boot windows BUT have linux in a virtual machine

OR in linux install: http://www.andlinux.org/
it runs native within windows and is actually really good (makes my windows usage time bearable)
 
If you're looking for better 3D performance then running a VM would be the absolute worst way to go. Don't expect a 20% performance loss; expect 20% of the performance of a card in a non-virtual environment at best. You would be better off dual-booting between Linux and Windows. I know there are some virtual machines that are capable of 3D acceleration (well, just some VMWare products like Fusion and Workstation) but the big catches are:

*) DirectX 9 is barely supported e.g. no shader support.
*) Performance is ass-tastic (you're not using your video card; you're using your CPU to emulate an entire video card)
*) Very, Very glitchy e.g. missing textures
*) Last and not least, it's experimental.

Tylerdurdened said:
Also, is it worthwhile to install a VM OS over your primary OS for general desktop usage at all?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure if this is entirely true, but I've heard that running a virtual machine on top of an existing machine is more secure due to working in a sandboxed environment. If such an event like infection from a virus occurred you could fallback to your host OS to revert to an earlier snapshot (assuming that the VM software supports a feature like that) and you're good to go.

Tylerdurdened said:
Also I read that virtual machines retain their full performance as if they were running natively. I have a REAL tough time believing this. Granted I've never messed around with VM's but this is just unbelievable to me.
Click to expand...

Some newer processors have native support for virtualization. Read here for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization
 
Hmm. I see.

I just wish that VM were more seamless. I don't what to even be able to tell I'm running Windows right now.

And I really don't want duel boot for various reasons (I'm weird in the way that I can't have two OS's, I have to choose one to dedicate myself to entirely).
And this is where VM comes in. With VM it solves a couple of problems. One being that it's going to be 100x easier to install Linux because I could alt-tab between the howto's and the installation, while also letting me use Windows for gaming now and then and some Windows only software.
 
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