3d hardware acceleration on VMWare (3DMark 2001, nature scene)

3d benchmarking on VMWare player with 3DMark 2001 and enjoying the demo including the famous 'Nature scene'.

Enable D3D support in Virtual Machine that has been ' powered off ', but NOT suspended or still running!
Add the following to the configuration (.vmx) file for the virtual machine:

mks.enable3d = TRUE
This line enables accelerated 3-D on the host. It is required to support accelerated 3-D in the guest and also enables the host to accelerate 2-D portions of the guest display.

svga.vramSize = 67108864
This line increases the amount of VRAM on the virtual display card to 64 MB. Adding more VRAM helps to reduce thrashing in the guest. The maximum value is 128 MB.

vmmouse.present = FALSE

This line disables the absolute pointing device in the guest. Applications which require DirectInput relative mode need to turn off the absolute pointing device in the guest. In practice, this is only required for a certain class of full screen 3-D applications (for example, real-time games like first-person shooters).

If you do set the vmmouse.present option, you should also turn off the preference for motion ungrabbing in the Input tab of the Preferences settings dialog.

To turn off ungrabbing for vmouse.present:
-Choose Edit and then Preferences.
-Click Input.
-Deselect Ungrab when cursor leaves window.

Unlocking 3D hardware from within a virtual machine is very possible and has been implemented more or less in various VM software packages.
-Virtual Box supports 3D openGL acceleration on Linux guests but your Linux distro needs to be compatible with the 'extras' you need to install.
-VMWare supports D3D to a certain extend on Windows XP guests - I've actually made a couple of old videos showing this off. I've got an older version of 3D Mark up and running and also the game Need for Speed Hot persuit. In order to 'activate' the 3D support you needed to edit one of the configuration files of a specific Virtual Machine running XP. It is cumbersome and not very compatible still. On the Apple Mac side (VMWare Fusion) 3D support is more solid and access to it has been built-into the GUI but I haven't run VMWare on Mac for a while.
-Virtual PC doesn't support any hardware acceleration whatsoever.
-On the Mac there's Parallels which does support 3D hardware acceleration to a greater extend actually allowing you to run games accelerated either in a Window or full screen.
-Wine / Crossover / Cider - implementations of Windows32 API allowing Linux, OSX and other OS-es running on x86 cpus to execute Windows applications. On the Macintosh Crossover games really does a great job directX 9 support D3D. Quite a few steam games actually run on Crossover Games. Games like Halflife, Outrun2006 run great. Also another Windows based racing game Toca3 runs great this way. Need for Speed hot persuit also functions rather well.
-DOSBox - great way to run older dos games. It is even possible to install Windows 3.1x and run games on it - provided you install the right drivers. I've made a little video on that as well. It is also possible to get Windows95 up and running albeit very very buggy. Made a video about that as well - quite a while ago with a link to a website providing all the information to get people started (Vogons).

So you don't necessarily need virtual machines in order to play 'older games'. There's quite a bit of software out there that might suit your needs.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• 3d
• video
• acceleration
• vmware
• emulation
• 3dmark2001
• nature-scene
• benchmark
• 3d3
• directx
• accelleration

[Victron357]

I downloaded HALO Combat Evolved (thumbs up for HALO) and when I opened it up something popped up saying "A problem occurred initializing Direct3D. Hardware acceleration maybe disabled, please run DXDIAG" and on machine info it says (0x 1132) please help

[markvergeer]

@Victron357 If you are able to run dxdiag on your own virtual machine and it functions then it could be that the 'simulated' 3D graphics card is lacking the features necessary for the game to function.

DXDiag Directx 9.0c runs without problems on my VMmachine.

[pglAymer]

Dear markvergeer

i want to play a game called minecraft. uve probably heard of it. when i payed my 20 bucks to download the game and tried to run it, it said that i needed to "accelerate" openGL. i have windows xp btw. could u help me out? do i need to do some searching around in my computer to "activate it" or buy a new video card altogether?

[markvergeer]

@pglAymer Not sure if you are trying this game on a regular computer running Windows XP or in VMWare. Last time I tried this in VMWare I only got directX 3D3 to work. Direct3D and not OpenGL.

If you are running the game on a regular PC with a graphics card supporting 3D there should be OpenGL drivers available for it.

h t t p : / / w w w . o p e n g l . o r g / w i k i / G e t t i n g _ s t a r t e d

could point you in the right direction. Good luck!

[markvergeer]

@pglAymer What kind of video card do you have?

[1Thebas]

Hi!i have a problem with my game is X-men the official game,i have download the game i have click on the game and the computer say:Unable to initialize the Direct3D,make sure the hardware acceleration is set to full.What i can do?Please help me.

[markvergeer]

@1Thebas Please be sure to update the DirectX within the virtual machine to the latest version. If that still fails it could be that the machine-add-ons providing D3D support via a virtual graphics driver isn't up to the task. See if there's a new version of the add-ons.

If you are using an older version of VMWare try to migrate the VM to the latest free VMWare Player and install the new add-ons. That may help too.

[BigGreenClaw]

@kaltarX its the exact music from F-Zero X

[kaltarX]

The music in the background is a remix from the Video Game F-Zero!

[runescape2ws]

those boxes arent popping up therefore i cant enable how do i fiix?

[iloveyouvincentkun]

amm excuse me how can i enable my direct 3d its always disable

[00thebadboy]

man hellpp all games in my windows 7 cantt opn the game the till me : make sure hardware acceleration is set to full and 3D helpp no one game oopn in my windows 7 help.

[VerResE]

How bout vmware fusion?? Does it work too? Tks :)

[mbrooks987]

where is the .vmx file on my mac??

[xXxCr1ZxXx]

I wanna put a file on this i chose my own OS but this SHIT is weird.