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Enabling Accelerated 3-D for a Host

To enable a host for accelerated 3-D:

Hardware —

Use a host video card with support for accelerated OpenGL, such as NVIDIA TNT, GeForce and Quadro cards, or ATI FireGL and Radeon 8500 (or higher) video cards. If you are unsure, check with your hardware manufacturer.

Software —

Upgrade the video drivers for your host to the latest available.

  • NVIDIA drivers are available at

    • www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp

  • ATI drivers are available at

    • www.ati.com/support/driver.html

  • (Linux only) — NVIDIA GPUs support the features used in Direct3D acceleration. Linux open source drivers are not enabled. However, if you have a video card with an Radeon 8500 (or better) GPU, you can attempt to use the Direct3D acceleration using the ATI driver available at

    • www.ati.com/support/drivers/linux/radeon-linux.html

    Windows —

    Perform these steps to prepare a Windows 2000 or Windows XP host.

    Make sure hardware acceleration is turned up in the display properties.

    1. Right-click the desktop and choose Properties > Settings > Advanced > Troubleshoot.

    2. Move the Hardware Acceleration slider all the way to the Full position.

    Linux —

    Perform these steps to test your Linux host for compatibility:

    1. To verify that direct rendering is enabled, run
    glxinfo | grep direct

    2. To ensure that 3-D applications work on your host, run
    glxgears

    After your host is configured, configure a virtual machine for accelerated 3-D.

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