Help needed: Virtual Machine

[ming]

hi all.

does anyone use virtual machine(s) on their system?
im currently testing Vista on VMware and noticed that it loads VMware graphics adapter instead of my own nvidia graphics. does anyone know how i can get around this as it's stopping me from testing out some of my games which require DX or OpenGL.

I have thought about loading VirtualPC, but it takes ages to install and run compared to VMWare. The other major issue is that VMWare allows users to install both 32 and 64-bit OS, whereas with Virtual PC, you can't install the 64-bit Virtual PC application on a 32-bit Windows, AND you also can't install a 64-bit OS inside the 32-bit Virtual PC application.

 

[madmatt]

VPC 2007 itself takes a minute to install. Installing Windows takes less time to install (depending on your hardware) on VPC than it does normally.

I use VPC 2007 quite a bit for testing.

 

[X-Istence]

Unfortunately there is no way for VMWare to give direct access to any Virtual Machines to your graphics card. This has to do with the fact that doing so would allow a OS to break out of the Virtual Machine, also, if VMWare gave the graphics card to the Virtual Machine it would mean that the host operating system would lose control over it, and as such it would be impossible for it to display any of it's normal graphics and programs. Unfortunately we have found out how to virtualize the CPU, but not any of the sub-systems that one would need for gaming (direct access to RAM, and GPU). We will eventually get there, but it will be a while.

So what you want to do is not currently possible.

 

[fitz]

half the point of virtualization hardware is that the physical hardware is abstracted (virtualized) to form virtual hardware for the virtual machine. you will run into the same problem with Virtual PC I believe.

 

[LordOfLA]

vmware emulates directx just very very very slowly