Playing a game in Vmware vs Virtual PC? Which is better? I know...

crewxp

Distinguished
Jun 10, 2006
157
0
18,680
First of all, I know... doing this would probably produce horrible results. And most of you would tell me not to... But I just want to experiment and see what happens.

Battlefield 2142's punkbuster isn't compatible with windows 7, so I want to either install Windows Vista in Virtual PC, or Vmware Workstation to run the game, because I really hate restarting my computer. I usually go weeks at a time without restarting. I just want to see how well it runs.

If you would HAVE to guess of which Virtual imaging system would give me better results, which would you say? Vista in Virtual PC or Vmware? My Setup is below.



My Setup:
E6600 2.4Ghz @ 3.8Ghz Stable with Watercooling
8 Gigs Ram
ATI HD4870 GFX Card with 2 monitors
ATI x1900XTX GFX Card with additional 2 monitors
P5W DH Deluxe Motherboard
 
I am willing to bet it won't work at all. Your graphics card renders the 3d images and pushes them to your monitor. When you use a virtual PC or Vwmare type machine, you are only receiving images that are processed by the CPU. Not the graphics card. I am willing to bet you get a graphics card driver error when you try to launch a game.
 
Games do not run natively on the hardware when within a VM. Given your hardware specs, my guess is that the game will load and run but since the VM is using generic video drivers, the game will be at the lowest resolution, no eye candy, and prolly get very low frame rates.

Good luck! Post your results.
 

armani2468

Distinguished
Jul 23, 2008
25
0
18,540
Status - Just curious I guess... Plus you can always install the correct drivers in your VM...but not sure how that would pan out- It should work though. Would really depend on how beefy your machine is as well :bounce: