QEMU Windows 11 Iris Xe Graphics Bare-Metal vs GPU Virtualization in 3DMark 2006
73DMark 2006, the last 3DMark benchmark for Windows XP, marked the beginning of the end of Windows XP era DirectX 9.0c/SM3.0 PC games. And for many, this was the golden era of Windows PC games with many memorable games. Not every games could have the attention of source-ports and Steam/GOG have yet to be able to preserve every single one to be playable on modern machines and into the future of 32-bit software apocalypse. It is in the hope that Virtual Machine with GPU Virtualization will be the home of preservation for those great Windows PC games.
It has never been a secret that GPU Virtualization in the form of OS driver model abstraction (for eg. Virgil3D, VMware SVGA 3D etc.) will always be associated with high overhead regardless of API forwarding or re-rendering one API into another. In this video, it was shown that GPU Virtualization has a hefty 60% loss of Bare-Metal performance. Nevertheless, 3D graphics workloads are always perfectly linearly scaled with shaders core-count and GPU memory bandwidth. Since the last decade or so, GPU performance had always doubled, tripled & quadrupled in every generation iterations. So 40% of Bare-Metal performance is still lightyears ahead of anything that simply rely on CPU brute-force for PC emulation. 40% of RTX 3090 can very likely be the fastest GPU for WinXP VM on QEMU when pairing with Intel Alderlake Core i9-12900k, rivaling any retro-purpose built Windows XP PCs or GPU pass-through with the last breed of GPUs with Windows XP drivers. No extra space needed for yet another PCs or dealing with the cumbersome of multi-display setups, keyboard & mouse switches. And the best of all, no hilarious prices to pay of junkyard-grade CPUs/GPUs & motherboards just for playing one's good old games collection.