Warning, Ubuntu Karmic / VMWare Player

[Ben Eisenbraun]

On Mon, Nov 09, 2009 at 12:24:20PM -0500, Tom Buskey wrote:
> What else does VMware offer over VirtualBox?

Significantly better graphics performance for guests.  At work I run linux
guests on VMware Server, and the VMware video driver implements enough of
the OpenGL spec that I can test 3d modelling applications.  The VirtualBox
guests have a tendency to either lock up or crash X when I run OpenGL
applications on them.

At home I run a Windows XP guest inside VMware Player on my MythTV box so I
can stream Netflix videos to the TV, and it's the same deal.  Silverlight has
some DirectX accelerated bits, and the VMware graphics driver seems to handle 
it fine with  reasonable CPU usage.  The VirtualBox XP guest eats 100% of
the CPU and then hangs the guest when I try the Netflix stream.

VB 3.0 has beta support for some of the accelerated 3d stuff, so it seems 
that they know this is an area that needs attention, but I couldn't get it
to work for DirectX under Windows XP.

-b

--
the imagination imitates; it is the critical spirit that creates.
                                                    <oscar wilde>