Our view from day one has been that by running virtual machines directly on traditional PC hardware rather than remotely on servers, we can deliver the manageability, reliability, and security benefits of desktop virtualization while providing a better end-user experience. Graphics performance is quite literally the most visible aspect of the user experience, so it is a major area of focus for us. We have great 2D graphics working in our beta deployments today, but we won’t be satisfied until we have 3D graphics performance that is not discernable from a native operating system installation. We don’t want to “cheat” (and open up a big security hole) by allowing a graphics driver in Windows to bypass the hypervisor. We want to do it all in virtualization.
Our fearless CTO, Alex Vasilevsky, not only came up with a great architecture for fully virtualized 3D graphics, he actually showed up one day with a working proof of concept. A couple of us decided to put it to the test and run two separate 3D applications (Quake and Google Earth) in two separate virtual machines. As you can see, they are running simultaneously. With NxTop, you can switch between them in an instant while both operating systems are using 3D graphics. By the way, be careful when switching to Google Earth while playing Quake, as you generally get killed pretty quickly when you’re not paying attention to the game.
Check out the video:
December 24th, 2008 at 5:00 am
[...] 24, 2008 by Bert Bouwhuis Virtual Computer heeft een proof of concept video geplaatst waarin getoond wordt hoe twee parallelle virtuele desktops op een bare-metal client hypervisor [...]
December 29th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Virtual Computer Featured in The Boston Globe…
The Boston Globe featured Virtual Computer in “Bright Lights in a Dark Season” — an article focusing on Virtual Computer’s successes during the economic downturn.
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December 29th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
[...] Computer developed a special version of Xen to address this shortcoming on client side, and now it’s ready to show how it works when dealing with a 3D video cards and some graphic-intensive software like Quake and [...]
March 21st, 2009 at 7:56 pm
a virtual machine trying render 3d scene cannot competite with dozens of specialized shaders. So, why don´t do VirtualMachine as pure 3d app with OpenGL output and it´s V-GraphicsAdapter lazy and fool, let it sends all 3d graphic calls from guest directly to real hw? Well, it should be less safe, but virtual server in bank or data center doesn´t need 3d at all.
September 25th, 2009 at 4:39 am
“We don’t want to “cheat” (and open up a big security hole) by allowing a graphics driver in Windows to bypass the hypervisor.”
Huh? You guys are just like the rest of the bunch then. When on earth will we see system that specificly *allows* to by pass hypervisor and thus allow superior 3d performance?
Note: Vmware has done Directx9 virtualization also…
Like someone pointed out, I would love to take a small risk of security hole in my home desktop for 3d performance… In fact, I have to take even bigger risk: And run Windows as only OS (to get decent 3d performance)! Damned this security reasoning in this case is oxymoron.
Btw, if it really were trivial to cheat, why on earth none implements the possibility to cheat and bypass the hypervisor?