4 replies to this topic

[prophile]

Despite my setting the video memory in Virtualbox to the maximum, at 128MB, my Mountain Lion VM only shows in the System Profiler as supporting 5MB of video memory, and whatever I do I can't seem to get it to actually support 128MB in practice.

After doing a lot of research, I believe this is what's causing Mountain Lion's graphics to be really laggy. Window minimizing and maximizing from the dock is choppy, and the dock magnification is flickering as well. Flash player objects and Top Sites in Safari also flash and stutter with lots of white. The Applications folder, which I've placed in the dock, is jerky when it opens. Launchpad is barely usable.

I've tried searching around the internet for answers -- specifically for Mountain Lion virtual machine installs -- but I can't find anything useful.

For what it's worth, I have an Acer Aspire V3-771G-9875, equipped with Intel Core i7-3610qm quad core processor and Intel HD4000 integrated graphics + NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M.

I also have Snow Leopard 10.6.2 and 10.6.8 (clone + update) installed as virtual machines on Virtualbox. 10.6.2's System Profiler shows up correctly as supporting 128MB of VRAM, but the updated clone (10.6.8) only shows up as supporting 3MB of VRAM. However, it doesn't matter as much to me, since Snow Leopard runs smoothly as a VM either way.)

As for the sluggish Mountain Lion VM, does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix it? Thanks.

[eep357]

could it be caused by GPU using shared system RAM and not dedicated VRAM?

[prophile]

eep357, on 09 October 2012 - 09:27 AM, said:

could it be caused by GPU using shared system RAM and not dedicated VRAM?

I tried setting Virtualbox to only run with my dedicated NVIDIA card and not the integrated Intel graphics, but it didn't ease the stuttering and System Profiler still only shows 5MB of VRAM. The Mountain Lion VM is definitely usable; it just doesn't have the smoothness and frame rates of my Snow Leopard VM.

Other weird problems with the Mountain Lion VM are Finder often not showing any folders and files and taking a long time to load (colored pinwheel), and Flash Player working in Safari (with white flashing) but stuttering in videos on Chrome (though Flash ads display normally) and not even showing up at all on Firefox despite being installed and with right-click identification.

[eep357]

It could be the Virtualbox software is not yet up to snuff for running ML, an update may be needed

[prophile]

I'm thinking that is probably the case. I might have better luck installing on my physical HDD and dual-booting.