Does anyone know if its possible to virtualize high graphic cards - I can't find if the virtual drivers are available? - Hope this makes sense, just nudge me if I need to elaborate

If you mean that the virtualized machine has a decient graphics card and will perform like say a Gforce 8900 then no, most VM systems I've used (MS, VMWare etc) will pretty much virtualize a really old just about VGA card.

Part of the problem from a programming point of view is that modern GPUs would take up so much processor power to even emulate a percentage of the power of a physical GPU.

Jen

So what you are saying if I have a graphic intensive application it would be in my own interest to host it on a dedicated physical box.

I ask as we host several clinical applications that are used to manipulate scans and xrays real time which are over 300mb per image

Suck it and see really, however if the application actually uses the GPU to make the application faster, then physical is the only way to go.

Just because the images are large, it doesnt always mean the GPU is involved, it may just need beefy CPUs. Saying that though I would avoid virtualising things like this as throwing 300MB images around will take a lot of memory bandwidth which a virtualised machine may not be able to provide.

Jen

Pesonally I think that you should go down the physical box route, what OS are you installing on your VM boxes, 32bit or 64 bit - certainly something to think about when it comes to driver support!

I own a cyber cafe and I have just 1 graphics card of 512 MB installed on server and all other machines can use its services when some client is playing gmes.
I never used any virtual drivers for doing this.