News Nvidia adds 3D tech to virtualisation

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2009/03/31/nvidia-adds-3d-tech-to-virtualisation/1

Nvidia has announced a new technology for its high-end Quadro FX cards dubbed SLI Multi-OS, which allows virtualised operating systems to access the hardware directly.

 

Oh awesome, i've been waiting for this tech for over 2-3 years now, ever since I heard that such could be done since pci-e 2.0.

The Quadro price range is somewhat out of my reach, but would look forward to this technology filtering down to the average gfx card market.

 

It won't, not via NVIDIA anyway.. This is the only way they can actually sell Quadros for the price tags they currently stick on them, driver feature segmentation.

VirtualBox has experimental OGL acceleration though, so it might be possible at some point - but I don't expect NVIDIA to be the enabler in such a scenario.

And given how much NVIDIA is on Microsoft's tit I doubt they would be willing to support something that would lead to a number of enthusiasts (effectively their evangelists) using Windows only for games and using Linux, BSD or Solaris for everything else.

 

That is extremely good news. What kept me from running a virtual system as my main system is that gaming is just not an option. It'll also be nice to use for testing new releases of Win7 because you will finally be able to see how it really looks.
Other than that I don't have much use for it.

 

Parallels have somehow managed to get 3D Acceleration on their Workstation for Macs, allowing Windows games to be played with 3D acceleration under virtualisation on a Mac.
I wish they'd port it over for their Windows version, or that VirtualPC or VMWare would do the same.

Even up to DirectX8, anything at all so that glitchy games that don't work well on XP or Vista could be played under a virtualised instance of Win98SE.
Mechwarrior 3 & Dungeon Keeper 2 under 3D-accelerated virtualization would be fantastic..

 

Would so love to see it filter down as well. Finally be able to get my server to run media center for htpc, 08 server for house hold apps and file server, and freebsd for my webserver. All in one box.

 

Workstation 6.5 has dx9 support (and not 'experimental' either). My friend's played Flatout 2 through it, while not a particularly demanding game it was certainly at a playable frame rate. Granted, Workstation isn't free..

 

Counter-Strike does not play well in Workstation 6.5's 3D.