Virtualization Platforms

There are many virtualization platforms available on the market. HOOPS Luminate runs on all virtualization platforms. However, and that’s the problematic point here, some virtualization platforms do support hardware accelerated graphics, and some others don’t.

Running HOOPS Luminate on a Virtualization Platform

First, if you plan to use hardware acceleration, please do start HOOPS Luminate as usual. If HOOPS Luminate does not start, please follow the software restart procedure detailed here: Software Restart After Failure. It’ll ensure that HOOPS Luminate can still be used in software, if no hardware acceleration is available.

HOOPS Luminate is OpenGL based. While using virtualization platforms, several OpenGL features may be missing. If HOOPS Luminate was able to start in hardware or hybrid rendering mode (as detailed here: Hardware or Software Startup), then all the HOOPS Luminate features will be available. HOOPS Luminate has internal codepaths to choose how some effects have to be processed on different graphics hardware, depending on the available OpenGL feature set. Note that this does not cover application specific usages: for instance if an application using geometry shaders tries to run on a virtualization platform that has no support for geometry shaders, then the shader will not be executed.

Virtualization Platforms Detection

The RED::IGraphicDevice provides an identification of several virtualization platforms to the calling application:

  • VMWare Display Device,

  • Virtual Box Graphics Adapter,

  • Microsoft Remote Desktop Environment,

  • Parallels Desktop for MacOS

The information returned here by the RED::IGraphicDevice is purely informative and does not presumes anything on the capabilities of the virtualization platform in terms of hardware acceleration. The RED::IGraphicDevice does not recommend any graphic driver when HOOPS Luminate is operated from a virtual machine. It just returns the RED_HW_VIRTUAL_SOFTWARE_DRIVER string as driver recommendation.

HOOPS Luminate Certification Perimeter

HOOPS Luminate is being tested on many operating systems (all windows revisions, Linux versions and MacOS 10.x as of HOOPS Luminate 4.0), with many graphic adapters (ranging from the old INTEL GMAs, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5000 and ATI Radeon 9600 up to the latest graphics hardware available to date). All this occurs in a native environment made of:

  1. An official operating system

  2. A graphic adapter

  3. A graphic driver

  4. HOOPS Luminate testing programs for a given HOOPS Luminate version

HOOPS Luminate is known to work with almost all virtualization platforms, but none of them are certified: The certification of virtualization platforms is outside of the maintenance perimeter we deliver for our product.