This movie has been making the rounds. It shows off 3D graphics in VMware codename Fusion on a Mac. Let me clear up a few things.
- This has been an "experimental feature" of our product line since Workstation 5.0, released almost 2 years ago.
- It supports DirectX 8.1 with no shading. Regis, aka hpreg, tech lead of the Fusion team, says we’re working on 9 and 10. My supposition is that Vista Aero is driving this, but being able to play games is certainly very nice side benefit on the desktop, since we usually cater to the server crowd.
- You can turn it on right now in Workstation in your vmx file with mks.enable3d = TRUE. (Read the linked docs for more info.)
I assume it will work in Player as well, but don’t know about Server. - In the video, the virtual machine had just 512 MB of virtual RAM and 1 virtual CPU, according to the poster. Although the video shows it in a window, it will work in full screen mode just fine, according to hpreg.
- In the Fusion beta discussion forums, hpreg has disclosed that this feature will been turned on a future beta. Fusion’s engine is a port of the Workstation/Player/Server family.
- We don’t comment on future releases, but the video shows a beta with the switch in a menu. I suppose at some point it’ll be just turned on by default, but usually "experimental support" means that it works, but we’d like to put more QA on it before absolutely guaranteeing support. We are very anal retentive and careful about QA here, and we like to think it shows in the resulting product.
Everything clear? Questions should really go to the Fusion team, who hang out in the discussion forum. You do need to be registered to go to that link — sorry, we probably need to rethink that — but it just takes a second and is free.
