Virtual machine gaming

Flipping the big X switch
We have created a Windows Vista Ultimate x64 and Windows XP Pro 32-bit virtual machine. If you don’t have a 64-bit host system, 32-bit client VMs will suffice. After our virtual machines are installed and updated, we will try running some tests, to prove our shader paths are accessible. The below image shows the initial setup of our VM. This particular machine is running externally, on a physically-separated FireWire 800 hard disk.



Below again shows the ‘Edit Virtual Machine’ menu. In here, we need to tick the ‘Enable DirectX Support’ box. Do not worry that there is no related option for OpenGL. It is intrinsic within the acceleration
architecture provided.



You should also consider entering the ‘Memory’ options section and turning the amount of virtualised video memory up to 64MB. We’ve found this is one of the problems that your virtual environment can run into if attempting to load games, in that the screen buffer is starved of memory. VMWare fusion is a little different, in that we have some additional options to enable for optimal performance. The top right image opposite shows VMWare Fusion’s DirectX hardware acceleration option.

For optimal results, VMWare Fusion allows us to go a step further, in assigning ‘virtual SMP’ on multiple processor cores, as shown in the second image to the above right. This is a considerable step, as many game engines support SMP execution.





Things aren’t as easy for Windows or Linux-based VMWare Workstation users. The versions of VMWare are not as advanced yet on these platforms. As a result some ‘manual’ fiddling is required. First, you’ll need to make sure your host system is running accelerated drivers for your respective hardware. Within Windows, start ‘dxdiag’, using Run from the Start menu, click the ‘Display’ tab and go through the DirectDraw/DirectDraw3D tests. For Linux, try the following:

glxinfo | grep direct

You should be presented with a Direct3D process ID. If it isn’t running, you’ll probably need to reinstall your drivers correctly. Afterwards, try running:

glxgears

If this works, your GPU driver is installed correctly under Linux.

Next, you’ll need to make some changes to your .vmx configuration file, in both Windows and Linux. Add this to the configuration:

mks.enable3d = TRUE
svga.vramSize = 67108864
vmmouse.present = FALSE


Save the file and exit your editor.

Finally, in all versions of Parallels and VMWare you’ll need to install VMWare Tools/Parallels Tools within the guest operating system, as well as making sure you have the DirectX 9.0c End User runtime installed. This can be obtained from Microsoft directly: www.microsoft.com/downloads/search.aspx?displaylang=en&categoryid=2.

Inside the machine
So, with our configuration behind us, we will load into the virtualised Windows environment. The first thing we should test is that our shader paths are working correctly, thus proving the virtualised GPU is functioning. We installed 3DMark06 in Windows Vista and Windows XP on all the virtual client operating systems. Below shows our results, on executing 3DMark06.



Hang on a sec. Aren’t VMWare and Parallels supposed to support Direct3D 8.1/Shader Model 2.0? Sufficed to say, no; 3DMark will not run in the capacity you want it to. So, time for some less obvious tests. We decided to check out the actual DirectX subsystem, to make sure it was rendering correctly. Inside the virtual operating system, from the ‘Run’ command:

dxdiag

This brings up the DirectX diagnostic panel for Windows XP/Vista. From here, we go straight to the Display tab and attempt to run the DirectDraw and DirectDraw3D tests that check each revision of the Direct3D interfaces, as it goes. Below shows DirectDraw working correctly.



Next, we should test Direct3D 7 interfaces with DirectDraw3D.



Getting a little more adventurous, we try out Direct3D 8.0 interfaces.



Finally, we should test Direct3D 9.0 interfaces.



Failure! As expected and as stipulated in the Parallels/VMWare guidelines, Direct3D 9 shader paths do not work yet.

Next, we decided to try and isolate the shader models using the SpeedTree tool. The SpeedTree algorithm is implemented in various games, from Half-Life 2 to Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Running SpeedTree gave us the following results:



VMWare Fusion, VMWare Workstation and Parallels all raised this error on execution of the program. Only Parallels ignored it and kept attempting to render the scene, as can be seen below.