VirtualBox 3.0 Beta ADD DX8/9 & OpenGL 2.0 support!!!

Change list can be found HERE

Does this mean I can finally enable transparency and transistions in my Windows 7 emulation???

 

No, not yet.

 

why not? I thought the only reason it didnt work before was the lack of DX9 support...doesnt this bring that support to the table?

 

It probably still lacks the WDDM driver. VMWare Server/Workstation lack this, yet I think Fusion has it. I wonder why it's taking so long for VMWare to make it available for it's entire virtualization software lineup.

 

Are you sure it isnt capable of using the graphics card? That blows... Im sure it can hangle Aero though, as I've enabled Vista's Aero on VMWare before(with no slowdowns), and I think Virtualbox as well but not sure about the latter.

 

Starting with Virtual Box 2.1 (Windows) /2.2 (Linux), VirtualBox can support OpenGL hardware-supported graphics. It's not great, however. I successfully ran Half-Life on Win7 on Virtual Box 2.2.2, and the frame rates weren't horrific, but whenever I moved the mouse my view went all out of whack - not the nice fluid movements I get on my XP native box at all. It may be better by this beta - they did say 3D support was still experimental in 2.1/2.2, after all.

My guess is, if Aero doesn't work, it's because of the WDDM at least. You can get the 128 MB VRAM on VirtualBox. DirectX 9 (even not 9.0c) will get Pixel Shader 2. WDDM is the only thing lacking.

SMP support is a neat addition here, though. That implies multi-core VM's. And as CPU-heavy as VM's tend to be, I can see that helping. I have to say I've been impressed with Sun's quick progress with VirtualBox in the past six months or so. Their 64-bit guests on 32-bit hosts was another neat feature, and one that has worked better than I expected - flawlessly with Windows 7 64-bit as the guest on XP 32-bit host. Probably not as useful as SMP or GPU support, but a nifty proof-of-concept.

edit: Awww, no support for multiple CPU's with 64-bit guests on 32-bit hosts. Oh well. Guess you can't have everything!

 

can't wait. virtualbox grows and grows, it's cool.

and, apollo. so it's true that i can run a 64bit os in a 32bit os? hah, i thought i've read it wrong last time

and yep, SMP is very important to me. having a quadcore, giving all the virtual guests at least 2 cores is important. singlecore user experience is just crap

 

Yep, it is true that you can run 64-bit guests on 32-bit hosts. I've tried Fedora 10 64-bit and Windows 7 64-bit on my XP 32-bit host. Fedora gave a kernel crash notification every time it started that the 32-bit version didn't give, but seemed to run fine. Windows 7 64-bit has run perfectly. It is still "experimental" as the Linux crashes testify to, but it certainly isn't bad.

As for the SMP, it's definitely still beta. When I tried to install Windows 7 32-bit with it, it crashed with Guru Meditation. So I installed Win7 without SMP, turned it on, and got a Blue Screen of Death saying, "A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary processor within the allocated time interval." I then tried Ubuntu, with no luck. Xubuntu started up, but when I switched to full-screen mode it went blank and stopped responding, and it hasn't successfully started with SMP again. The only success story I've had yet is Mandriva 2008.1 (Spring), which has been thriving with multiple cores. Not only did it handle two cores of my C2D T7500 well, it even handled 3 cores well (you can give up to twice as many virtual CPU's to a VM as you have physical CPU's - no idea how that's implemented!). Didn't try it with 4 as I don't see the point other than to show it can be done (VirtualBox does say giving more processors than you actually have can result in sub-optimal performance).

Haven't tried DirectX yet. But, even though there's still a lot of bugs to be worked out, it's an interesting release. With all its experimental features, Virtual Box stable releases might be what's normally considered "beta", so this "beta" might be more like an "alpha". Sure does make development seem fast, though.