After having recovered from losing my patience with the farce that is 'The MSI " Failed', and the equally-farcical "solution", I decided to give VMware Player 7.1.2 a try, because VirtualBox 5.0 was unable to display any 3D motion graphics.
I put VirtualBox to the test with 2 programs: PassMark's Performance Test 8.0, and the original release of DOOM 3. The PassMark test bypassed the 3D rendering test, and in my attempt to run DOOM 3, I got the familiar error message, similar to this: "This program encountered a problem, and needs to shut down."
So, I tried both of these programs with VMware Player 7.1.2. Though the 3D rendering test ran, it was slow, and limited to the window test (the full-screen test did not run). As for DOOM 3, it also ran, but the graphics left me thinking that VMware Player needs a more powerful graphics emulator.
The first picture shows what the opening screen of DOOM 3 looks like in my 64-bit Windows 7 host.
The second picture shows what the opening screen of DOOM 3 looks like in my Windows XP guest.
I have Windows 7 Pro (64-bit), in a machine with an Intel Core i7-2700K CPU, 16 gigabytes of RAM and a GeForce GTX 760 video card.
My Windows XP Pro (32-bit) guest was set up with anywhere from 512 megabytes of RAM to 2 gigabytes, 80 gigabytes of virtual disk space and anywhere from 256 megabytes to 2 gigabytes of video memory, with 3D acceleration enabled.
For a guest setup like this, which was typical of many machines in 2005, I thought the graphics would also be typical of most graphics cards in 2005. Unfortunately it is not even as fast as the Intel HD3000 graphics processor in my host CPU.
Is there a way to beef up VMware's virtual graphics processor, so that a game like DOOM 3 displays properly? If not, then I suppose, like its problems with reinstallation (i.e., MSI failures), VMware Player is due for a complete upgrade and/ore overhaul of its WinXP guest additions.
