Fusion 11 and Mac Pro 2013 Graphics access

[fredlimp]

Running Fusion 11.0.0 on a Mac Pro 2013 (and later) High Sierra (10.13.6) with dual AMD FirePro D700 cards, 8 cores and 96 GB memory. Windows 10 (Feature update 1803) all current updates.Running ArcPro 2.2 from ERSI.  Arc Pro  reports that no compatible graphics adapter is present and all 3D display actions are (as a result) very laggy.

VM Display set to Accelerate 3D graphics

VM reports

VM Shared graphics memory 1028 (as recommended)

VM assigned 4 processors and 32GB memory

Windows device manager = VMWare SVGA 3D

I have searched the community and support for suggestions on how to address the issue but have not found anything.

Under Windows Graphic Settings .. options for the Arc Pro app are (as expected)  the VMWare SVGA 3D

[dempson · Accepted solution]

Looking at https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/get-started/arcgis-pro-system-requirements.htm

Under the heading "Video/Graphics adapter requirements" it says that it requires "DirectX 11, feature level 10.1, Shader Model 4.1" with fallback to "OpenGL 3.3 with the ARB_viewport_array, EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic, and EXT_texture_compression_s3tc extensions."

VMware Fusion 11.0.0 does not support DirectX 11 (only 10.1), so the OpenGL fallback would be required (and the software apparently does that automatically). According to the release notes for VMware Fusion 10, OpenGL 3.3 is supported in Windows guests, but I don't know offhand whether ArcGIS Pro's required extensions are supported.

Given that ArcGIS Pro would have to use OpenGL, they recommend OpenGL 4.5 (not achievable in Fusion), also having the ARB_shader_draw_parameters and EXT_swap_control extensions (I don't know if they are supported) and 2 GB of dedicated graphics memory (you only gave it 1 GB).