QEMU DOOM 3 Demo (2004)
8Welcome to Mars City from UAC (former SpaceX, Blue Origin, NASA and ... just-a-joke ...). It is spectacular to have QEMU Virtual Machine running DOOM 3 in HIGH quality and playable frame rate. The game full glory of geometry models shading, atmospheric effects, shadows and light illumination are fully realized without compromise. A unique implementation of MESAGL pass-through is direct OpenGL pass-through that exposes the underlying GPU OpenGL capabilities in entirety. So the game would be able to see NVIDIA/ATI/AMD graphics GL extensions and make use of them. In this demo, the game was running on Ryzen APU with Vega Graphics and it picked up ATI_fragment_shader extension and took the ATI favor R200_Init rendering path. A separate screenshot was shown having the game running on NVIDIA GT730 and it picked up NV_register_combiners extension and took the NVIDIA favor R_NV20_Init rendering path.
It is amazing how things has come along in virtualization for PC games. I still remember on MESAGL pass-through inception, DOOM 3 was unplayable, at ~15 FPS on Linux KVM and ~8 FPS on Windows 10 WHPX in 640x480 LOW quality. There wasn't any major design change in MESAGL pass-through implementation that would bring significant performance improvements. Apparently, both Linux KVM and Windows 10 WHPX had improved over time in virtualizing CPU/GPU shared memory mapping in a way that makes CPU data marshaling of GPU payloads faster. This is just my guess but it feels great to accomplish what virtualization is capable of PC game preservation.
So IdTech4 DOOM 3 is a highly popular PC game title and the game still works perfectly on modern Windows 10 with modern GPUs. For non-Windows platform, there are also several successful source-ports rather than resorting to Virtual Machines. Yes, all these are true but for those who would prefer to play retailed CD version in "pristine condition", QEMU Virtual Machine would be the ultimate answer. It is also a significant milestone that every other games based on IdTech4 game engine would be fully playable on QEMU Virtual Machine. This is great for Linux gaming for games without source-ports, just play them from Windows XP VM on QEMU Virtual Machine.
VirtualBox and VMware didn't seem to be able to run DOOM 3 on VMs from several years old postings around the Internet due to the game advanced techniques in OpenGL. If this is still true today, then I am proud to present the only VM solution that is capable of playing DOOM 3 in its full glory.
Have fun!
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