I just upgraded from Fusion 7 to Fusion 8.0.1 and the performance of my Windows 10 Guest went from fast to slow and laggy. I have a mid 2014 MacBook Pro running El Capitan with a 2.2Ghz iT, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD. The VM was up with 6GB RAM and 2 processor cores. If I boot up the VM and launch the Edge processor, it takes seconds to open a new tab. Press the Windows key and it will take 5 seconds to open the start menu. I did upgrade the VM after upgrading Fusion and it's using hardware version 12.
What can I do to fix this? The VM went from being a great test bed to try Windows 10 to being unusable.
A quick email from VMware support sorted this out. Shut down the virtual machine and go to Virtual machine > Settings > Display > Disable 3D graphics acceleration. And the VM is happy happy again.
Given solution is correct.
This worked for me as well. I am on a MBP with 16 GB with Mac OS 10.9.5 (Mavericks) and running Fusion 8.1.0. Made a noticeable difference in rendering speed. Some folks appear to be on later Mac OS (El Capitan) and having sluggishness there so I am holding back.
I've been struggling with VMWare Fusion on my MacBook 12in and have been thinking that the MacBook didn't have the capability to run Fusion as my old MacBook Pro (2011).
I have now disabled Accelerate 3D Graphics and it has made a big difference in running Windows.
My set up:
Hopefully this helps others.