3D accelerated graphics in VMWare Fusion
February 08, 2007
VMware products have had a semi-hidden switch for some sort of 3D support in virtual machines on Linux and Windows since VMware Workstation 5.0, which was released almost 2 years ago (April 2005). Since then, work on the 3D front has been progressing steadily, with DirectX 8.1 support in VMware Workstation 6 and VMware Fusion (both are built from the same code base). Internally, our goal is to support DirectX 10 for Windows Vista's Aero.
I use virtualization (VMWare and Microsoft) heavily at work, and I plan to take full advantage of it at home on OSX once I finally upgrade to an Intel Mac. 3D support will be great, since otherwise I’d have to keep a bootcamp partition around in addition to one or two virtual machines I plan on running. Parallels fans shouldn’t worry; rumor is they’re working on 3D support as well.