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Running each game/demo in it's own Virtual Machine

fudspong
Explorer
I don't know much about Virtual Machines but I have a vague awareness of what they do. It's likely that someone that does know about them will shoot me down here, but here goes.

I've seen news (my DK2 has yet to arrive so I don't know first-hand) about how you need to do various things at a system level to get many games and demos working, and it's different for each, what works for one game needs to be changed for the next. So my question therefore is, why not run each game in it's own VM with it's own system-level settings and preferences? When you want to switch game/demo, just load a different VM instead of mucking about with system settings.

Would that work / make things easier for people?
3 REPLIES 3

Lagahan
Explorer
Your idea is solid but unfortunately VM's don't have enough performance to do this, the extra layer between system hardware, OS and then devices would be bad enough for regular gaming, never mind VR.
I'm not even sure if you can get full memory access or GPU acceleration properly inside a VM.
I remember looking into this when Windows 7 came out first - I'd skipped Vista but some old games don't like 7 so I was gonna run them in a Windows XP VM. Got shot down pretty quick in forums 😛
DK1 status: Delivered, DK2 status: Delivered Rigs: CPU: i5 2500k @4.8GHz GPU: R9 290 @1.1GHz RAM: 16GB OS: Windows 7 Pro x64 CPU: i7 4710MQ 3.3GHz GPU: 2x880M 8GB RAM: 8GB OS: Windows 7 Pro x64

Phoenix90
Explorer
VM Ware supports direct GPU access in the VM and you can get decent framerates, but here's what won't work :
The rift will not be recognized from inside the VM because VM ware needs to recognize the physical device to give the virtual machine access to it.

Also it's not really neccessairy to go through this trouble, 90% of the demos work with the exact same configurations, and the other 10%'s changes usually don't break the first 90%, don't worry so much, as long as you use windows 7 or 8 you'll be able to run almost any VR experience that works correctly on DK2

fudspong
Explorer
OK thanks for the feedback and reassurance guys, the great thing about forums is being able to ask people that know more than you do 🙂