Fusion 8, Retina MacBook, Windows 10 Looks Great, OS X Poor

[jarrah31]

I have Fusion 8 on a Macbook Pro with Retina Display.

Why is it that my Windows 10 guest can make the most of the Retina display (after scaling up to 200%) and looks really crisp and nice, yet my OS X El Capitan guest only supports a muddy non-scaled display or a really high resolution display (when "use full resolution for Retina display" is enabled)?

Is there any way I can make an OS X guest look as crisp as a native install of OS X on my MacBook please?

Thanks.

[SvenGus · Accepted solution]

This worked for me, with OS X 10.11 host and guest:

Enable HiDPI mode on a VMware Fusion OS X 10.9 Mavericks Vagrant VM · GitHub

In a few words, first of all enable full Retina resolution for the OS X VM, then run this command in the VM's Terminal:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist DisplayResolutionEnabled -bool true

... reboot the VM, and finally set the VM's Display resolution to the scaled value (half of the maximum), in the VM's System Preferences.

This should give you the same pixel-doubled resolution in the guest as in the host.

[jarrah31]

Fantastic! Works a treat, thank you very much for your help!

[SvenGus]

As I said elsewhere, ideally all this should be automated, i.e. integrated into the VMware Tools for OS X (with a script during their installation?)...