Maybe you didn’t notice but AMD is now pushing the OpenCL standard. This is a really great news, the first step to a common GPGPU technology: who on Earth would want force himself to write the same program for three different architectures ?
Let’s face it: when a Linux user wants to chill out for a little bit and play for a few minutes there is a good chance that the game he likes doesn’t like Linux at all. There is a very small number of commercial games working natively on Linux and making other Windows games run on top of Wine or Cedega isn’t straightforward everytime (especially if you try to run new games) so unless you really like FPSes like Quake, Unreal Tournament (up to the 2004 version) or the free Nexuiz or some other small game like SuperTux or TuxRacer you would probably want to try something else.
Before VMware Workstation 6.5 there were only two ways to do this: a gaming console or a dual boot with both Linux and Windows. Buying a console is too much for someone like me who doesn’t play more than 3 hours in a month and rebooting could really piss you off as it forces you to reset your working environment (unless you configure something like suspension to disk, but that’s quite another story).
This is where the new VMware come into play as it has a really working DirectX accelerated virtualization layer, I download and tested the version 6.5.0 build-110068 and found it to be quite stable on my computer with an NVIDIA 9600GT, an Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 clocked at 3.0Ghz and 2GB of RAM.
Of course don’t expect to get native hardware performances but the results are actually above my expectations, the major bottleneck is the low amount of RAM assigned to the virtual machine: please note that with only my 2GB I had to run my host operating system (x86_64 Debian Sid) and VMware itselft (which uses RAM other than the one assigned to the virtual machine) so in the end I was unable to assign more than 900MB to the guest Windows XP. This is the main reason behind the bad performances that you will see on the Unreal Tournament 3 test video, if you look carefully you will notice that it runs smoothly in complex scenes and then it suddently freezes: that’s where it has to swap data because of the low amount of RAM.
So, here we go, here the interesting part is…
OGRE 3D demos:
Unreal Tournament 3 (keep in mind the low RAM thing explained above):
Various screenshot in this gallery:
If you liked it why don’t digg it?