MWLL in Virtual Machine under Linux?

[kabrinski]

Hey there!

I am thinking about setting up my computer with a new OS, preferably Linux (Suse, Ubuntu, ... we'll see).
Is there anyone having tried running MWLL in a virtual machine which runs Windows 7 or XP?

Would be glad if anyone could share an experience.

Best regards
Kab

[Mitchpate]

VM's use software emulated video cards.  Attempting to game in them is never a good idea.

[Gouty]

Better off to attempt using wine.  Although... good luck with that

[[IPA] Taltos]

VM's use software emulated video cards.  Attempting to game in them is never a good idea.

I'm not sure you're correct. Virtualbox at least uses hardware virtualization for GPUs, and can do OpenGL, for example.
All the same, the limitations on usable GPU memory in the VM will probably do you in in the end, I think it's 128MB max.

[Freeborn_Toad]

VM's use software emulated video cards.  Attempting to game in them is never a good idea.

DX9 MWLL runs fine in recent versions VMware in my experience. It's not as fast as the native game, and there are occasional glitches, but it's quite playable.

It's not software emulation either.

[Mitchpate]

What version of VMWare are you referring to?  I've yet to have an enjoyable experience gaming in virtualized OS's and I have an extremely hard time believing that a game as taxing as MWLL can be played with a decent FPS in a virtual environment.

[Freeborn_Toad]

What version of VMWare are you referring to?  I've yet to have an enjoyable experience gaming in virtualized OS's and I have an extremely hard time believing that a game as taxing as MWLL can be played with a decent FPS in a virtual environment.

VMware Workstation 7.1+ and 8.x.

[Freeborn_Toad]

Made a Windows XP x64 virtual machine (allocating 4 cores and 4GiB of memory) in VMware Worstation 8.0.1, installed newest VMware Tools, updated Windows, updated DirectX, and copied my Crysis Wars crap over.

Here is MWLL running at 1440x900, no AA/AF, all HIGH in game settings, except particles which is medium:



Had a solid 30-70 fps the whole game, except the occasional loading/zooming pause. There was some minor texture corrupting and a bizarre shadow bug that made it seem like as small could was following me around, but the game was totally playable and looked pretty good. I'm sure I could improve things further with some more tweaking.

[kabrinski]

Thx for the test!

The only thing for me is, if I want to invest 200$ for the VMWare Workstation...

[Freeborn_Toad]

If you are concerned with legitimacy, I can probably build you a VM that you can use with the free VMware Player. I'll just leave Windows unactivated and you can activate it with your own key; most Windows Pro or higher ELUAs do allow a second copy to be run in a virtual machine on the same system, if I recall correctly. Just let me know what Windows OSes you have a license for. I have ISOs and/or discs for everything (MSDN).

[Mitchpate]

most Windows Pro or higher ELUAs do allow a second copy to be run in a virtual machine on the same system, if I recall correctly.

I know Win7 Pro and up allows a virtualized copy of XP or Win7 but I don't think Vista does.

[[IPA] Taltos]

you could always try in virtualbox or some other free virtualization solution first...

[Mitchpate]

Unfortunately most of the free solutions that are linux compatible aren't all that great.  Even VMWare's free version makes me pull hair out and I absolutely love VMWare Workstation.

[Freeborn_Toad]

VirtualBox's 3D implementation is still pretty bad.

With recent versions of VMware you usually end up with 30-60% of native 3d performance. VirtualBox is more like 10-20% and much lower compatibility.

[Mitchpate]

I guess the simple solution is to either dualboot or use Windows7 as the host OS.