[Tfug] Beryl

[Rich]

On Aug 6, 2007, at 6:49 pm, Predrag Punosevac wrote:

> If  you were running on the top of Windows that is enough of the  
> reason to
> be unresponsive.
> I would guess 1Gb of memory and a serious graphics card are  
> minimum. Check
> the FreeBSD for
> the list of supported graphics cards.
It took me a while to work out what was running on what :-)

VMware does 3D, it's just not on by default: http://www.vmware.com/ 
support/ws5/doc/ws_vidsound_d3d_enabling_vm.html

Not sure how it achieves this; and I'm not that interested.

The obvious option (lightweight, fast) is to request a drawable area  
through the host OS and pumping OpenGL commands through that directly  
into the native graphics card.

The idiot/savant option (i.e. most compatible, most laborious,  
slowest), and the only one I've seen so far, is to implement a simple  
graphics driver that can handle some 3D stuff, rendering it in  
software, then dump that bitmap at every (periodic) vertical refresh  
into the host OS's visual space. In this case, your native graphics  
card isn't going to matter much but your CPU speed and memory  
architecture is.

The halfway house option (labourious, mediocre speed, not so  
compatible) is for VMware to arbitrate 3D through the host OS's  
graphics driver, but still rendering the result in software.

Where a host OS is expected to handle graphics stuff for VMware's  
clients, that host would need a pretty hefty graphics card.

R.