4k Screen on host (Windows 10) has small resolution on guest (lubuntu) for VMWare Workstation Player 12

[sjuneja]

I have gone through several similar posts over the past year or two. There's no concrete solution to this.

- Tried messing with the configuration file. The svga width, height, and vram size settings.

- Tried adding more video memory by enabling "Accelerate 3D graphics".

- Disabled the DPI settings.

- Tried some more things which didn't work.

Can anyone please point out a good fix for this problem? Everything is so tiny on the screen.

[mhampto]

Hello,

One of those should have made some progress. Have you tried this with another OS?

Matt

[sjuneja]

Hi,

Which OS? Guest or Host?

Host - Not really an option.

Guest - For the work, I am doing right now, can't change the guest either.

And nothing has worked till now, which is very weird. And I am not the only one continuing to have this problem. So perhaps not an issue from our end and more of a problem somewhere with VMWare Worksation Player?

If you have a specific set of steps that should fix such a problem, could that be released somewhere in an official capacity? That's probably the only way this could confirm if users aren't making a mistake anywhere while changing settings.

If you'd like more information on this or my VM settings, please let me know.

[bluefirestorm]

Based on your reply it looks like you are in search of display scaling for the LUbuntu guest but keeping the 4K Windows 10 display setting.

I don't have Lubuntu, but try this from terminal. It will scale the display twice as big.

xrandr --output Virtual1 --scale 0.5x0.5

You may have to change Virtual1 to some other name depending on your setup. You can see the display name by entering xrandr without any parameters.

To go back to original scaling

xrandr --output Virtual1 --scale 1x1

You can also create custom screen resolutions (using xrandr with some input with cvt) that are not available although these would not be permanent (i.e. does not survive between logoffs/reboots).

For example you can experiment a 3:2 aspect ratio 1800x1200 with scaling of 0.75x0.75 with the following entered at Terminal

cvt 1800 1200 60

# 1800x1200 59.89 Hz (CVT) hsync: 74.57 kHz; pclk: 180.75 MHz

Modeline "1800x1200_60.00"  180.75  1800 1920 2112 2424  1200 1203 1213 1245 -hsync +vsync

xrandr --newmode "1800x1200" 180.75 1800 1920 2112 2424 1200 1203 1213 1245 -hsync +vsync

xrandr --addmode Virtual1 "1800x1200"

xrandr --size 1800x1200

xrandr --output Virtual1 --scale 0.75x0.75

Once you are satisfied you can set the xrandr as some script.

[sjuneja]

Thanks for that reply, bluefirestorm!

Helpful details.

The scaling you mention does work, but unfortunately, even a little amount of scaling (I tried 0.95 too) resulted in massive performance issues.

[bluefirestorm]

I am not sure what you mean by massive performance issues. I can only guess that the refreshing of the screen seems to be in slow motion.

Is the "Accelerated 3D Graphics" in the Display settings selected on the guest VM?

Are you using a desktop or notebook? Does it have a discrete GPU or just using Intel graphics? If you are using a notebook with Nvidia, make sure Nvidia is the default graphics processor in the Nvidia Control Panel. Desktop Nvidia doesn't have that option so VMware Player might just be using the Intel graphics as its render device. Don't know of any similar software settings are available for Radeon cards.

If you are using desktop with discrete GPU, add one of the following lines in the vmx file of the guest VM. 0x10de is for Nvidia and 0x1002 is for AMD. This makes sure that VMware Player will use the discrete graphics as the render device if you also have integrated Intel graphics.

mks.dx11.vendorID = "0x10de"

mks.dx11.vendorID = "0x1002"

Make sure also that the VMware Tools are installed in the lubuntu guest. If I am not mistaken, most Linux distros have bundled the vmwgfx driver. You can check this via dmesg | grep vmwgfx

If you have only just integrated Intel HD graphics, probably not much can be done to improve the graphics performance. The Intel Iris and Iris Pro seem to deliver decent graphics performance though.

As I suggested earlier, you can experiment with different resolutions. Probably create a script that adds all the different resolutions. You can start by adding 3600x2700, 3200x2000, 3200x1800, 3000x2000 or whatever high resolution not available in the standard list. And then select them and adjust the scaling to see.