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VMWare's 3D graphics acceleration just around the corner?

arstechnica.com — First, the company announced its initial public offering (IPO) plans to the world. The second piece of news, which is perhaps far more interesting to Mac users, was that a mysterious, anonymous video was leaked yesterday showing Windows 3D graphics acceleration running on VMWare for OS X.

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  • tony.pitale, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13This would solve problem number two with Parallels. The first being it's failure to use multiple cores. Fusion here I come.
    • shinynew, on 10/12/2007, -4/+66I just hope to god that it will carry over to Linux, if that happened I wouldn't ever shut down ubuntu.
    • Quix, on 10/12/2007, -7/+9Now we just need Apple to start keeping pace with the PC world with their 3D hardware and we'd be set. The iMac has been running the Radeon X1600 for what, a full year now?

      Apple, you can do better. The iMac would be a killer game machine with some better 3D hardware (and even now it's pretty good...).
    • paradexes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9@shinynew Linux already has the functionality. Fusion is based on the same code. Workstation 6 is supposed to be on par with fusion in terms of 3d performance. Just check out their website.
    • skyshock21, on 10/12/2007, -12/+4This is still going to be rough for apple since many of the newer upcoming games are going to rely on DirectX10. How would you overcome this?
    • myheaditches, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15Oh oh! I know! Instead of running Windows XP in fusion, you could run Windows Vista in fusion! It's crazy enough to work!
    • superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11I've been reading for some time that Parallels is working on this too, so the race is not over yet!
    • MrFoof82, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@Quix

      The 7600GT is also an option, but only in the 24". They'll never put anything ridiculous in there since a nice feature about iMacs is they're nearly silent.

      I'm holding out on my Mac purchase until the iMac refresh which will hopefully include Penryn up around 3GHz, LED backlighting (I can hope), and a mid-range 8th generation nVidia GPU (8600GT?)
    • pufuwozu, on 10/20/2007, -0/+16@shinynew: Vmware for Linux already supports it.

      http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=84344
    • robosport, on 10/12/2007, -8/+4I agree with Quix. The X1600 in the MacBook Pro? Why call it a Pro? I want to switch but that graphics card just won't cut it with professional 3D apps. I'll have to keep using the Dell M90 with the NVIDIA Quadro FX 2500M or 3500M. Now that is a "pro" notebook.

      I would switch to a MBP 17" in a heartbeat if it had a mobile Quadro FX card in it. I'm pretty sure most of my software customers would too. Please Apple stop ignoring the graphics card.
    • BlackAdderIII, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5@pufuwozu:

      The way the 3D acceleration works in VMWare on Linux at the moment is not good.

      Taking windows apps as an example, Wine's D3D->GLSL has substantially better support than current 3D accelerated VMWare, whereas the point of bothering with the overhead of a whole OS for a 3D app would be to get 100% compatibility for that 3D app.

      VMWare with fully supported 3D acceleration would be the death of windows as a "real" installed OS for many people.
    • nedzalife, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Did anyone else catch the fact that all that games that were demo's were all DirectX 8.1 API? None of them were DX9c. Impressive start for a virtual machine for sure, but I thought Parrallels was getting full DX9c API support within the first half of 2007?
    • panique, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@Quix, my friend - I've got an X1900XT in my Mac Pro. I can play Battlefield 2 at 2048x1536 with all settings on "High" and sustain 70fps. I characterize that as "keeping up". The iMac is marketed as a mid-range general purpose computer, and the X1600 is an appropriate card for that type of machine. My only quip is when are they going to put one of those mobile PCI Express card slots into a Mac Book Pro so I can game on the road.
    • Lounger540, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The MacBook Pro has always had an ExpressCard slot. That's PCI-Express.
    • shinynew, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@pufuwozu
      oh sweet jesus you have made me so happy.

      EDIT: just read BlackadderIII's comment. damn. guess still duel booting.
  • CrazyMike, on 10/12/2007, -8/+21meh....show me it playing some newer games then will talk.
    • superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -10/+11Actually you can already play Half Life 2 using the Codeweavers crossover stuff for OS X:

      http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/

      You don't get what the VMWare advancement is about, do you? What is would mean is that under virtualization, I could run any Windows application and to the Windows app (including game) it would look just like any other copy of XP with a powerful video card. Why would it *not* play modern games, or anything you can play on Windows today? It would also support the advanced graphics UI of Vista. It's imrpoving the hardware layers under the virtualization part to basically just be a passthrough for the Mac video card.

      If you think about it, using a virtualziation system for games is really ideal because then you have a "dedicated games" platform that you are not installing other software on to screw up the performance of your Widnows apps. So Mac games using Windows games will probably see better performance than many gamers stuck to Windows only because they can optimize the hell out of any given VM instance!
    • xkidmidnightx, on 10/12/2007, -17/+1Wow the fatties are angry tonight.


      Better clean the cheetos off the keyboard fatties.
    • mitrovarr, on 10/12/2007, -4/+14@superkendall

      "If you think about it, using a virtualziation system for games is really ideal because then you have a "dedicated games" platform that you are not installing other software on to screw up the performance of your Widnows apps. So Mac games using Windows games will probably see better performance than many gamers stuck to Windows only because they can optimize the hell out of any given VM instance!"

      Well, except for the overhead of running two operating systems at once, and the inevitable losses involved in emulation. Also, you'll get hit with the performance damaging-fluff that you install on the 'outer' OS. Oh, and if you were willing to have to install and support multiple operating system installs, you could have just had multiple installations on different partitions.
    • superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15@mitrovarr:

      Indeed, there is some overhead from the OS that you loose out on with virtualization. But that is what swap space is for, when you have only one OS consuming most of the processing time the other will mostly swap out.

      However you are very wrong about one thing, there is no "loss to emulation". Virtualization is not emulation. Virtualization is running x86 code on an x86 processor at full speed. If they do the 3D stuff right all that you have for overhead is an extra method call as they forward video card requests down to the real video card, again no emulation needed.

      And as I noted, the ability to really tweak out a game specifc VM (removing all overhead like anti-virus, extra services, etc. etc.) will probably more than make up for whatever slight loss there might be.

      I already run computationally intensive graphics programs in Windows using Parallels - there is no drop in speed.

    • jasmin888, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@mitrovarr:
      I know from personal experience that a virtual os dedicated for one purpose can be a *lot* faster than an all purpose general installation.
      The speed comes when you run the VM in full screen mode. What I've seen though is that sometimes the graphics may lag just a enough to be noticeable.
      I guess for gamers this would be a crucial issue. But that apparently is already solved for linux and is now being solved for macs as well.
      I've had w2k running on top of another w2k. I've had w2k running on top of xp in both cases were there an increase in performance regarding computing but a slight lag in drawing the screen.
    • BlackAdderIII, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@mitrovarr:

      Dual boot doesn't cut it. When you use virtualization for desktop use (and that's what we're talking about here) a big part of the goodness is you don't *have* to spend hours supporting it, and you don't have to trust control of your computer to it, and you don't have to interrupt your computing session to use it.

      With virtualization you can revert to your original copy of that OS any time you like, and keep persistent files elsewhere, so if/when a guest OS requires hours you don't have for stupid maintenance tasks you shouldn't have to do in 2007 (defrag, antivirus, whatever), you just delete it and start afresh next time - and you can revert any brokenness without taking your computer offline for hours while you reinstall an OS, driver support and apps.

      If some legacy OS breaks, or messes with the bootloader, or screws up packet filtering, or fragments its file systems, or can be rebooted by a network worm, or has some weird problem with your soundcard, or is incapable of providing vital functionality, or otherwise requires reinstalling or rebooting, it doesn't even inconvenience you, let alone cause a problem.

      You can also test, bugfix or support several OSes at once, or repeat steps in another OS whilst staying in touch with task that actually requires that testing/support.

      These are the issues that make it worth virtualisation, hell, they'd make it worth halving performance to be honest, but come on, dual booting doesn't really address most of the advantages that virtualization provides.
  • Prototek, on 10/20/2007, -57/+3Totally useless. I use Windows so I don't need these 3rd party Mac patches that cost money to play my games.
    • colincornaby, on 10/12/2007, -0/+22Well gee. Some of us happen to use apps that only ship on the Mac, and we play games too. I'm sorry if your sensibilities were offended.
    • Prototek, on 10/12/2007, -39/+5Even Mac admits their computers are for creative teenagers. Get off myspace, grow up and get a job.
    • pengu, on 10/12/2007, -14/+13AND, you dont need any third party patches to give you vulnerabilities galore, and about 100,000 virii, malware and other little nasties. have fun playing those games on your zombie bot-net'd PC idiot.
    • Quix, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18Prototek, who's Mac?

      P.S. Welcome to my block list, troll.
    • Prototek, on 10/12/2007, -26/+3Windows might make your computer a zombie but Apple makes YOU a mac fanboy zombie.
    • Bootes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5You don't have to use "3rd party Mac patches that cost money to play games" on a Mac either. First of all we're talking about an application here not a patch, but you can easily just boot the computer into Windows and play games. This does not require buying a separate program and is really what a person should be doing if they're running Windows on their Mac in order to play games.
    • xkidmidnightx, on 10/12/2007, -18/+6Games are for fat neckbeard virgins. Put the cheetos down and go jogging fatty.
    • jasmin888, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I run windows 3.11 and ie2 so the whole of digg is totally useless! nothing works!
      I don't understand why it is still around LOL
    • BlackAdderIII, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5"""Even Mac admits their computers are for creative teenagers. Get off myspace, grow up and get a job."""

      You have no idea how silly this sounds to those of us who have jobs and have been anywhere near the print/publishing/design/music/digital media industries in the last 15 years, where Macs have been considered by many companies as computers for work and pretty much for work only.
    • msgyrd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Logged in just to block you.
    • strictnein, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@pengu:
      The plural of virus is viruses.
    • ronin2040, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@strictnein
      you sure? In latin, virus (meaning man) was singular, and the plural was viri (long i). In medicine, im pretty sure its the same....I think (in comp sci) when you're referring to multiple specific breeds of viruses, you say virii (ie, he had 100 types of virii) and when you're referring to a plural in general with no distinction between types you say viruses. But I think both can be used, dont see why theyd totally reverse how the word is pluralized everywhere else.

      @protek
      lol@monsterfail

      @pengu
      I really want to argue with you about how us PC users arent all stupid, and how only the stupid ones get viruses (or virii :D), but....sigh...its true, 90% of PC users ARE retards, and DO have viruses....
      Dont forget though, there is that 10% of us that actually know how to use a PC, and tweak the hell out of it, mod it, XPize it, nLite it, AutoPatch it, etc and enjoy it perhaps as much as Mac or Linux users--mainly because we've discovered how to get around Windows shortcomings, and are able to enjoy compatibility with most programs you find on the net (though Linux's library IS impressive).

      Maybe I WILL try vmware on linux though....if its not a nuisance to set up.
  • emmanuelsotelo, on 10/12/2007, -9/+2Here is the video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF_CoXsXtk4

    Lol
    Duke Nukem 3D?
    • colincornaby, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Did you not watch? They did Max Payne 2.
    • devilbush, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2@colincornaby: OP is correct; it is Duke3D

      Anyway, wasn't Duke3D based on a sprite engine with no acceleration (i.e., a 2.5D engine)? If I recall, when that game was released, Monster had yet to release even the first Voodoo card. Why would VMWare use this game to demo 3D capabilities? Did someone eventually update the Build engine for real 3D after Duke (DFN jokes notwithstanding)?
    • SmokeTetsu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8They just showed Duke Nukem 3D as an example of what you might run without 3D Acceleration. =P

      But coincidently enough there is a port that uses 3D Acceleration called jfduke. You can even add high res textures and 3D models.
    • SmokeTetsu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2BTW, There was even someone who took jfduke and added other features and who does constant update making another version called eDuke32. I suggest you look that up if you like Duke3D and want to play it with enhancements.
    • colincornaby, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4"@colincornaby: OP is correct; it is Duke3D"

      Obviously you didn't watch the whole thing either. They also demo Max Payne 2 and Tony Hawk.
  • colincornaby, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14My guess is VMWare leaked it on purpose. They were second to the Mac OS X market, so they're going to do eveything they can to show that they are the better company for doing VM on Mac. And honestly, they probably will be. Their offerings on Windows make Parallels look like a toy. They're probably going to shortly blow away Parallels on the Mac side. Parallels may have had a head start, but they're no match for VMWare's expertise and existing code base. I can't wait for more of the Windows VMWare features such as their physical drive support to make their way to the Mac version.

    (End VMWare fanboy mode)
    • bromac, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Agreed. Virtualization is, and always has been, cool. They've been around for a looooong time, since the 1970's. They were splitting up CPU resources so you could run multiple apps back when we ran single task operating systems.

      Now, EMC has snapped them up. I remember the EMC rep at the Okanagan Storage Conference, a keynote speaker, was just beaming about how they had acquired VMWare. I see why -- even storage is becoming virtualized, with LVM, Dynamic disks, and image-level deploys of all stripes. In the corporate sector, you're seeing NAS, SANs, and remote deploys to vast, largely disparate, networks, lots of times managed by local IT departments or the branch office staff themselves. That, or Citrix/Terminal Services setups where it helps to be able to virtualize the servers.

      Virtualizing the entire shebang just makes sense. Bottom line - it saves a ton on hardware and support costs.

      Just don't forget Microsoft. Virtual Server is still strong in the Windows Server market, which still has the corporate sector by the balls. Microsoft also allows a number of free additional licenses for its Server 2003 products if you virtualize them, allowing you to save a ton on licensing, and I doubt this is meant to allow VMWare to take this sector.



    • superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Parallels has some really nice features though, especially for the consumer - they are the ones who first brought us Coherance mode which is pretty awesome, as well as great support for seamless mosue use across both environments.

      Not to mention that the latest beta of Parallels (well the last two) have had very slick Widnows installation helpers - in a Parallels dialog you simply enter your Windows serial number, then it asks you for the Windows CD and proceeds to do an unattended installation! For those not familair with it, that means that when parallels is done with the Windows CD you are booting into Windows, and do not have to answer any prompts during the install. Parallels was honestly the easiest Windows installation I have ever had.

      Also, they have been hinting they are looking at real 3D support as well so they may catch VMWare before that beta goes public.

      Basically, it's awesome to see such fantastic competition on the virtualization front.
    • colincornaby, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I own Paralells, but without physical drive support I don't find it useful. Physical drive support would be so useful for Mac troubleshooting (assuming VMWare gets Virtualiztion of OS X working like they said they were trying to do). Put the bad Mac into target disk mode, plug it in, and then start up the bad Mac in a VM.

      I use VMWare on Windows to troubleshoot old slow machines. I take the hard drive out of the slow machine, hook it up to my PC running VMWare, and run the hard drive in a virtual machine. I can troubleshoot their Windows 98 install without having to deal with the slow hardware.
    • misterjangles, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3colincornaby - i believe you can boot from a mac in target disk mode - from another mac.

      but, doing that - booting up the os onto different hardware (virtual or not) - does that really help troubleshoot problems? it seems like windows would go crazy installing new drivers and such as soon as you boot in onto different hardware configuration. if you did that with Vista, it probably would make you re-activate the license too.
    • colincornaby, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"colincornaby - i believe you can boot from a mac in target disk mode - from another mac."

      You can, but it's easier just to boot it within a window from another Mac. I'd rather have my troubleshooting tools still running on my boot drive.
  • Visk, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7I wish they released a 3D hardware accelerated version of VMware for Windows machines...
    • janach, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Whatever was showcased in the video has existed since VMware Workstation 5.0 so it's in the Windows version and the Linux one :) It's in experimental support though.
    • Yashu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I think it can already do direct3d. I am pretty sure it is just a switch in the VM's config file to enable it.
    • Yashu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Infact, here you go: http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_vidsound_d3d_enabling_vm.html

      So... old news (at least on windows).
    • paradexes, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9They already have had 3D. It has been around for almost 2 years in their products. Here is a post I am subscribed to that is a pseudo HCL for games.

      http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=482829񵸍

      I haven't updated it in a while but I have gotten other games (DX9 games) with mixed results. Some require the tool I posted in the forum post some dont. Your milage will vary depending on the game. anything useing HDR wont work....period. But if you disable it it will. HL2 might work but I haven't tried it. HL2 and CS2 are supposed to fall back as far back as DX7. So there is a chance it will work. I like to tinker with VMs quite a bit. There is alot of hidden potential (and alot of that can be easily googled) You should be able to enable 3D by installing VMware tools in Workstation and then adding the following 3 lines to the .VMX file.

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

      The svga line can be edited to 128MB. This I think is also shared with whatever ram you dedicate to the VM.

      Parallels can talk it up all they want but they still have vaporware until they have it out there. Coherence is nice but what good is it without 3D if you are a gamer? I can see the usefulness if you arent a gamer so kudos to them for that. They don't have Multi-processor support VMware does. So VM performance on the OS level can be impacted which means services and such will rely on one CPU as well as the games.

      VMware has had the goods at least partially working for 2 years. Seems like with the whole Mac Fusion thing they will probably be racing to get 3D out that much quicker now.

      I have been using VMware products for about 3 years now so I am pretty familiar with alot of the stuff they are doing both on the desktop and server.
    • Visk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That's for the help, guys. I didn't know VMware had GPU Hardware Acceleration.
    • paradexes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This ubuntu post should clear things up a bit. It lists what I said above and the limitations of 3D on VMware as well. It is actually pretty informative.
      And since the codebase is presumably the same in fusion I am guessing the limitations will more or less be there as well.
      http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=84344

      My advice is if you want to see this happen faster then go to the post I noted above. VMware people seem pretty good about replying on there.
    • smitting, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1*** Parallels can talk it up all they want but they still have vaporware until they have it out there. Coherence is nice but what good is it without 3D if you are a gamer? ***

      Why would a gamer not want to dual boot? Coherence rocks if you spend your days developing in Visual Studio.Net on a MacBook.
  • dsenior, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Right around MacWorld I think podtech did a videocast interview with the Parallels team, they said they were about 3 months away at the time from a release with 3D acceleration.
    It's definitely on the horizon for both products, I bought Parallels and I have no complaints with beta (3150 RC2?) or the consistent free updates. I can't wait till it reaches final.
  • Kwipper, on 10/12/2007, -8/+1Okay. After seeing the video, I am not really that impressed. It may be a milestone for VMWare but it's still behind the current technologies. All of the games I saw shown in the video were Direct X 8.1 and lower. (Yes, you can play Max Payne 2 on a Direct X 8.1 graphics card) So in other words the message I saw was....

    Now you too can play your favorite PC games of 2004 and before on your Mac and Linux!

    What year was it now? Oh yes. 2007. We PC users are up to Direct X 9.0c with Direct X 10 games right around the corner. What I would like for VMWare to do next time is to show it's 3D Acceleration capabilities with newer games that support Direct X 9.0. Then maybe I'll think differently about the VMWare platform than I do now.

    no digg. :(
    • CircleFusion, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Wait a second... It's behind current technologies? We're talking about virtualization here.

      The technology of interest here is not about getting directX 9 working. It's about getting 3D acceleration working at all in a virtualized instance of an OS. If you want to point out another virtualization technology that supports 3D acceleration, then I would say that VMWare is "behind current technology". Otherwise, I would say they are ahead of other virtualization technology.
  • Phil246, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Im still waiting for opengl acceleration to be handled in guest VM's through vmware.
    Directx does not concern me at all since im not interested in running windows VM's on a windows box
  • AlmostEvil, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4This was more than likely leaked by VMWare themselves, here are a few reasons why:

    * It seems a bit too professional to not have been, why?
    1. It's voiced over by a woman.
    2. The inbetween text graphics and other stuff like telling you where the menu options are don't seem to have likely done by someone who just wants to show off their beta version of vmware.
    * In 3dmark the person has placed the fusion window on top of the lower bottom of the display window in order to hide the frames per second. Why would someone who's just showing off want to hide the frame rate unless it's vmware themselves and they don't want to give the game away on what kind of performance hit etc it takes running under virtualisation?

    Otherwise, a very interesting video. Think I might buy VMWare Fusion based on that.
    • paradexes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2There is a blog by the lead developer Regis Duchne that basically tanks that. He says that the timing was poor because of the IPO annoucement. That makes sense to me if anything. It could have been an employee but not necessarily one allowed to release it. This is not something they have been known to do in the past.
      Check this out http://compfusion.blogspot.com/

      It was may have been an overzealous employee or something but nothing organized by the company if this is any indication.
  • stikkitjim, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Finally... Ubuntu with Beryl on the Macbook Pro can be possible!
    • trogdoor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Ubuntu with Beryl works perfectly on my Macbook Pro. Dual boot FTW
  • kotatsu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Funny thing (for me) is that this used to be my no.1 reason for not switching to Mac. Now though, I just play my 360 and Wii instead of PC, so it's no longer an issue. In it's place, I use Media Center Extender on 360 and couldn't do without it.

    Guess I won't be escaping from Bill's clutches anytime soon.
    • stikkitjim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@ trogdoor: I'm dual booting as well, but can't get the 3d working!! How did you do it? .... Didn't happen to get the wireless working as well by chance? :P
    • trogdoor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@stikkitjim https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MacBookPro And since the wireless card is Atheros I don't know why you had any problems, they provide great open source drivers and it worked out of the box for me.
  • digitallysick, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1about time??? why has this taken so long???
  • longhorn49, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1@stikitjim

    use ndiswrapper
    • trogdoor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@stikkitjim DON'T use NDIS wrapper, the Atheros drivers are great and native and should work out of the box, installing NDIS wrapper for your card would be akin to installing the windows version of Open Office with wine.
  • MrTonic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2If that thing works within reasonable performance and they carry it over to Linux... I can promise that only Microsoft product that runs in my computer will be in VM. Finally i can see that light at the end of the tunnel =)

    (And have a real reason for my wife that why i need to buy that dual core :p )
  • Sirusdv, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Once VMWare supports iVT (Vanderpool) from Intel, and has DX10 support I think I will finally be able to switch to Linux as a primary operating system.

    If you check out the Xen Project over at Cambridge (wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen ) you can see some pretty cool stuff done with the VT.

    They even managed to port Windows XP to run using full hardware virtualization.

  • panique, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1[rant]

    Why the ***** does everyone keep posting 8-15 minute long videos of ***** they could simply write up, and let the rest of the world read in less than a minute? This whole Web 2.0 trend toward video is evil. It would probably take less than 1/4 of the time for someone to blog it rather than make a video of it.

    [/rant]
  • shinynew, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1There should really be a push for a OS that runs purely VM or likewise, so you can have say lunix, windows, and OSX 86 all running then pause or put to low all but the gaming machine and then it would be like having a pure gaming system running without a reboot with a very low system loss. maybe a extremely stripped down linux, like down to the core + login + the libs for VMware or maybe once the built in virualzation gets up to speed just that.
    • smitting, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Rather than VM, it would be cool if someone released a quickbooting gaming OS. It runs one program at a time, and we boot into that to run our games. No windows running behind the scenes to slow anything down. That's how it used to be back in the DOS days on the most demanding games.

      I'm thinking an extremely stripped down linux with core + login + SDL. Only enough of a window manager to be able to select a game to play. And needs to boot in 10-15 seconds... BeOS pulled this off on a 486.
    • shinynew, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"Only enough of a window manager to be able to select a game to play"
      CLI FTW!
  • 3DProf4online, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0What are your opinions about implementing 3D into online store web sites? Could 3D improve product presentation in an online-store?
    3DProf4online
    from TouchBubble.com
  •  

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