Well, in theory, you can do some degree of "pass-through" in swapping DX9 calls for OpenGL calls, and send them like their VMWare's calls. That puts a hurt on performance, but if you have a 7600GT or a 7900GT, it'll still feel better than nothing.
That's some really challenging stuff. User Melgross might jump in here and say it is near to impossible.
But let's look at OS X. Basically in 10.4 with Core Image you can think of the entire environment as OpenGL based (or at least, this could be the way to go with 10.5 Leopard). That is also what they're trying to do with Vista (except it is DirectX9/10? based).
So, let's say in 10.5 or 10.6, while the CPU handles the virtualised Windows environment, the window with Windows running in it could be like an OpenGL object, with other DirectX9/10 objects within Vista kinda subsets of OpenGL objects.
But yeah, some sort of on-the-fly translation of DirectX9/10 calls to OpenGL, and re-jigging stuff so that the entire OS X environment, including virtualised Vista, are all in essence 3D objects. So you could have games running in one window with XP, a different window with Vista, and your OS X environment.
Kind of like a super-driver for the Mac that oversees everything, and a custom driver for WinXP and Vista, so that the super-driver for the Mac handles all the "core" calls to the GPU, with the custom drivers in the Windows OSes "deferring" to the super-driver for the Mac. Wow. Insane stuff
My ideal solution is one where it has 3D acceleration, but is 10 to 15 percent slower than native. That way, companies with high-selling programs can't say "Just run Windows", because it'd be unreasonable for them to say that if we have to pay an extra $250 or so to get slower speeds w/o reboot, or native w/ reboot.
Personally, I'd settle for DX9, because you can run Aero on a DX9 card, and honestly, you can't emulate DX10 w/ any success on a DX9 card.
Marvin - just because they don't have it yet doesn't mean they won't intro it for multiple platforms here. I mean, most VMWare installs are for servers in the Linux/Windows world, where 3D hardware graphics is no big deal. So there isn't much impetus to have it done. But in the Mac world, all their sales go to people like Onlooker or Sunilraman or myself who want to play games at a decent speed w/o rebooting. In my case, I want to play games and use EyeTV on a Mac Pro at the same time (assuming I can get my Mac Pro)
I can't afford a Mac Pro at the moment I play games on my AMD64-Venice singlecore 2.16ghz overclocked with 6600GT overclocked. Having a Mac where you can play Windows games in a separate window while still being in OS X and running other OS X apps, wow. Big Stuff.
Rebooting into Windows and running native 3D PC games with MacBookPro and iMac Core Duo is a great first step. Who knows, in the R&D process at VMWare and Parallels, some smart inspired people may decide to crack our holy grail of fully virtualised 3D GPU environments.
I'm not saying it isn't tough, but you'd get a lot of money for it. Heck, at $100 a copy, every switcher out there would pick that up with a OEM copy of XP for $225 (with a cheap flash drive to cover the OEM rule). Lots and lots of money to be made from Mac and Linux users if you could get them playing Windows games at decent speeds.
"Switch between operating systems by easily tabbing between applications and share data between the two operating systems by dragging and dropping files on the fly"
Cool. Parallels and VMWare going at each other. Good stuff. Virtualization rocks. Running bollocks PC applications on a Mac keeps things in control and sandboxes the bloody virus-prone Windows environment. Snapshots of your Windows machine state is good, you can always revert to a "cleaner" Windoze environment anytime.
Comments
Well, in theory, you can do some degree of "pass-through" in swapping DX9 calls for OpenGL calls, and send them like their VMWare's calls. That puts a hurt on performance, but if you have a 7600GT or a 7900GT, it'll still feel better than nothing.
That's some really challenging stuff. User Melgross might jump in here and say it is near to impossible.
But let's look at OS X. Basically in 10.4 with Core Image you can think of the entire environment as OpenGL based (or at least, this could be the way to go with 10.5 Leopard). That is also what they're trying to do with Vista (except it is DirectX9/10? based).
So, let's say in 10.5 or 10.6, while the CPU handles the virtualised Windows environment, the window with Windows running in it could be like an OpenGL object, with other DirectX9/10 objects within Vista kinda subsets of OpenGL objects.
But yeah, some sort of on-the-fly translation of DirectX9/10 calls to OpenGL, and re-jigging stuff so that the entire OS X environment, including virtualised Vista, are all in essence 3D objects. So you could have games running in one window with XP, a different window with Vista, and your OS X environment.
Kind of like a super-driver for the Mac that oversees everything, and a custom driver for WinXP and Vista, so that the super-driver for the Mac handles all the "core" calls to the GPU, with the custom drivers in the Windows OSes "deferring" to the super-driver for the Mac. Wow. Insane stuff
My ideal solution is one where it has 3D acceleration, but is 10 to 15 percent slower than native. That way, companies with high-selling programs can't say "Just run Windows", because it'd be unreasonable for them to say that if we have to pay an extra $250 or so to get slower speeds w/o reboot, or native w/ reboot.
Personally, I'd settle for DX9, because you can run Aero on a DX9 card, and honestly, you can't emulate DX10 w/ any success on a DX9 card.
Marvin - just because they don't have it yet doesn't mean they won't intro it for multiple platforms here. I mean, most VMWare installs are for servers in the Linux/Windows world, where 3D hardware graphics is no big deal. So there isn't much impetus to have it done. But in the Mac world, all their sales go to people like Onlooker or Sunilraman or myself who want to play games at a decent speed w/o rebooting. In my case, I want to play games and use EyeTV on a Mac Pro at the same time (assuming I can get my Mac Pro)
I can't afford a Mac Pro at the moment
Rebooting into Windows and running native 3D PC games with MacBookPro and iMac Core Duo is a great first step. Who knows, in the R&D process at VMWare and Parallels, some smart inspired people may decide to crack our holy grail of fully virtualised 3D GPU environments.
Cool. Parallels and VMWare going at each other. Good stuff. Virtualization rocks. Running bollocks PC applications on a Mac keeps things in control and sandboxes the bloody virus-prone Windows environment. Snapshots of your Windows machine state is good, you can always revert to a "cleaner" Windoze environment anytime.