Bit of a non-windows user here. On my primary install *nix install, I have vmware running a fully updated windows XP SP3 with .NET 3.5 SP1.
Of course, I tried it in my virtual windows because I didn't know about the pixel shader issue until AFTER I installed it and tried to run it. Sadly, vmware does not emulate pixel shader support, and enabling the highly experimental direct 3d acceleration does nothing to help this. So out it goes. Oh well, I can still use it to access IE-only sites, cross platform web development, and running Gens to get my Sonic 1 fix, I'll live.
Sometime over the next few days, I'll probably reboot into my Ubuntu install and see if WINE can handle this. At any rate, I'm merely reporting that current and previous versions of VMWare do NOT provide any sort of pixel shader support, as if that wasn't obvious enough.
I will note that enabling direct 3d access lets the virtual Windows more directly access the graphics card, but that did not help in this instance. I'm pretty sure my card has pixel shader support (Intel GMA 3100), so odds are it does not have any sort of support for pixel shading at all.
I'll report back as soon as I test it under wine. Hopefully, that will work and then you can compile it with winelibs and make it semi-cross-platform in the same way that Google Earth is. Or not. But for now, I go to test.
K, Back: turns out that I haven't actually figured out how to fix my graphics card on Ubuntu yet, as compiz is still broken for me, I'll have to fix that before I can enable access to the pixel shader, but from the looks of it WINE has not encountered any other errors yet.
