QEMU Windows XP Guest 3D Acceleration with SMP on Linux Host
13QEMU featuring qemu-3dfx made another big leap in the pass-through 3D acceleration by making all the Guest wrappers (GLIDE and MESAGL) SMP safe. Though the wrappers are SMP safe, it does not imply being SMP capable. 3Dfx Glide API was never designed to support multi-threading for rendering. Threaded OpenGL remains a challenging problem till this day and most games back then rarely use more than one thread for graphics. Nevertheless, other aspects of games such as audio processing, soft lights/shadows projection, game physics and A.I. calculation can leverage more than one thread on SMP capable OSes, such as Windows 2000/XP. Those are more sophisticated 3D games in the dawn of Windows XP era.
The Big Winner is no doubt Linux virtualization with KVM. Linux KVM, being the most developed and matured, fully supported Windows SMP-capable kernels since Windows 2000 while Windows WHPX can only boot Vista/Windows 7 SMP kernels. Nevertheless, 32-bit x86 Windows 7 SP1 or even the last breed of 32-bit Windows 10 22H2 can also be a wonderful Windows VM for retro gaming due to 32-bit compatibility with 16-bit installers. As multi-core CPUs being the norm nowadays, it would always be nice to have dual-core or quad-core Windows VMs for gaming. Retro gaming on VMs enables High Availability for productivity and offers the peace-of-mind in VM isolation without messing up or tainting modern Windows/Linux installations with archaic 20-year old games software.
As modern CPUs & GPUs getting ever more powerful in future, QEMU featuring qemu-3dfx is committed to deliver the BEST and HIGHEST quality in retro gaming with CPU virtualization and GPU acceleration. It is absolutely NO *\*BS\** about emulation accuracy.