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Improving Sierra performance in VMWare?


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Hi, I've just installed Sierra in VMWare from a distro and everything seems to be working fine, except for the graphics performance. I have the newest tools installed and I've tried using the beamoff app. That, unfortunately, doesn't work on Sierra, since Apple has started using Metal instead of OpenGL.

 

Any ideas?

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What are you having problems with?
what software.

you only have 128mb of virtual graphics memory so there is one problem except for that you shouldnt get any "normal" lag problems with the windows but if you try to run anything 3D intensive of course that wont work at all really.

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No you can't do that in vmware (workstation) nobody have figured out how to do that.

you can make a hackintosh and maybe get that to work if you have the correct parts in your machine but i know this isn't what you are asking about im just letting you now about that solution.

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Just install VMwareGfx.kext from darwin.iso 8.5.5.

I downloaded darwin.iso 8.5.3 posted by MSoK to double check.

The one from 8.5.3 contains the 2D Accelerator code.

In 8.5.5, it's been removed.

There's noticeable shrinkage in the size of VMwareGfx binary (in MacOS subfolder.)  The size of 8.5.3 is 304504.  The size of 8.5.5 is 106992.

Good to know, thanks Zenith. Is there anything that needs to be done other than installing new tools? For me it seems like graphics have actually degraded over last 2 or 3 tool releases...

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  • 3 months later...

Ty again Zenith. I extracted the package and used Pacifist to force install the newest kext. I'll post back if I notice a difference.

How did you go about installing it, not sure what a kext is. Also confused, you are running macOS Sierra on a PC? That is what it sounds like, but Zenith's response is about vmware fusion, that is a virtual machine to be ran on an actual mac. Is he saying that we can run the fusion tools in place of vmware tools?

 

Update:

I did run the tools from this download, but did not see much if any performance increase. Maybe I'll need to force install like you mentioned, except it did not appear to be any setbacks the normal way.

 

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/files/file/31-vmware-tools-for-os-x-darwiniso/

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  • 10 months later...
On 3/20/2017 at 10:12 PM, Zenith432 said:

In the latest VMwareGfx.kext from Fusion 8.5.5 VMware have discontinued the 2D-Acceleration code, and graphics performance is better now.

 

Thanks for this information Zenith432! :-)

 

The performance without the 2D acceleration code is not better on a El Capitan host and a High Sierra guest OS. The GUI (Finder & windowserver) of the guest OS is slow as hell!

 

I uninstalled the VMware Tools newer than 8.5.3 (8.5.10 at the moment ) and reinstalled VMware Tools 8.5.3 in the guest OS. You can download the 8.5.3 VMware Tools "com.vmware.fusion.tools.darwin.zip.tar" from
http://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/fusion/8.5.3/4696910/packages/

 

The 2D graphics performance is now much better than with newer VMware Tools. Because the VMware Tools 8.5.3 do not depend on newer APIs they require only OS X or macOS 10.5.x or newer. It seems VMware Tools newer than 8.5.3 are optimized for Metal graphics acceleration (upgrade to Fusion 10 or newer without reinstalling the tools), OS X or macOS 10.11.x or newer and VMware Fusion 10.x.x, the first version which supports Metal graphics acceleration on OS X or macOS hosts.

 

Btw, I use VMware Fusion 8.5.10.

Edited by NothingReal
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