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OS X VRAM in Workstation 11


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With the release of Unlocker 2.0 for VMware Workstation 11, I'd like to start a new topic to discuss graphics performance in OS X Yosemite. One of the key improvements of WS11 is the ability to allocate more video RAM to the guest OS, however this doesn't seem to apply to OS X. For those who have had trouble finding the vram settings in VMware, you must check the "Accelerate 3D Graphics" button under Display settings, then a new selector appears to specify the vram desired. However, you will notice that a warning appears saying that 3D acceleration is not supported in this guest OS, and upon booting the video RAM remains at 128mb.

 

So, what can be done about this situation? These settings may have been sufficient in 10.9 Mavericks, but most have found the graphics performance in Yosemite to be sub-par, to say the least. Using the BeamOff utility to disable BeamSync helps significantly, but the frame rate still suffers. Details on this method can be found in this post: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/302424-yosemite-on-vmware-unusable/

 

I have read in various places about people having success with Yosemite in VMware Workstation, so I'd like to hear what people have done to resolve these issues. Has anybody successfully allocated more than 128mb vram to an OS X guest? Any other tricks that people have learned to improve Yosemite's experience in general (even unrelated to graphics)? All thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated by the community.

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  1. Adding guest vram is useless without 3D acceleration in the guest.  32MB are plenty for all resolutions up to 2560x1600 w/ lack of 3D acceleration.  All it does is blit and that's enough (two framebuffers' worth).

3D acceleration in the guest is not supported and will not be supported without Apple giving the OK for it and publishing OpenGL driver interface files.

For the record, VMware guests have been able to use 'regular' guest phsyical memory for doing blits and/or texture transfers to host vram and/or all other memory transfers needed by 3D accelaration. -- This capability has been available since at least Workstation 7.  This new 'extra guest vram' sounds like marketing hype.

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As Zenith432 said it is pointless doing this but if you want to set it to 2GB edit the VM settings. Select "Display" and "Enable 3D Acceleration". You can then set the memory to 2GB from the drop down.

 

Alternatively edit the VMX file and add:

mks.enable3d = "TRUE"
svga.graphicsMemoryKB = "2097152"
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That said, if this new feature is a capability to map host vram directly into guest physical memory - then it's a whole different ball game.  That can certainly speed everything up - both 2D blits and 3D memory management.  Have you heard anything of the sort?  It's not documented in latest svga_reg.h ^_^

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  • 3 weeks later...

For use Graphic memory  like this image you must use Machine Hardware Compatibility 11.0

VMware-Workstation-11-Create-Powerful-Vi

 

After upgrade my old VM with 10.10 get error:

 

VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0)
vcpu-0:VERIFY vmcore/vmm/main/physMem_monitor.c:1123

 

Add in cnfig file

smc.version = "0"
svga.graphicsMemoryKB = "2097152"

 

now VM working but see only 40 Mb of video ram. Any ideas?

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