QEMU Wine-6.0.2 with Iris Xe Graphics -- Into the Dawn of XP Era Games on Virtual Machine
9QEMU virtualization, WineD3D and the ever increasing performance of CPU/GPU on modern platforms, open up the possibility of retro Windows games into the Windows XP era with DirectX 9.0c advanced shaders graphics. For Windows 11 Host, this implies "one machine for everything" modern Windows games, 2K/XP games on WinXP VM and 9x/ME games on Win98/ME VM, with the same keyboard & mouse, same display, without the hassle of GPU pass-through. The 3DMark05 score is equivalent to Geforce 8800 GTX in 2006. That GPU alone is 155W and today we achieve the same level of performance in 20W thin & light laptops with iGPU. Isn't Moore's Law great for retro gamers or one would rather be happy about Ryzen 5600X + RTX 2070 in the performance of Pentium II 233MHz with Voodoo3 3000 playing Blood 2 Demo at 800x600 medium quality ......
• R5-5600X PCEM v17 Test (Blood 2 Demo,...
Playing games in VM also provides the peace of mind that the Host OS stays clean & lean without having to install the games physically. When good old Windows games are preserved with QEMU Virtual Machine, one can rest be assured that the games will continue to work within VM. There is no fear of Windows Updates altering the behavior of OS that breaks legacy software compatibility. Windows 11 marked the 1st Windows OS that drops 32-bit CPUs support. While 32-bit software support remains intact, it is only a matter of time when that would also be gone. Linux & macOS had done it, Windows will not be too far behind.