Success! Paravirtualized Graphics working on TP 22H2

[Piipperi]

Previously, I was never able to get graphics acceleration to work with macOS guests in VMware Fusion. I decided to download the TP 22H2 just for fun to see if there's something more than just Windows 11 support being added.

And sure enough, without having to do any modifications to my existing macOS Beta VM (I previously had already added the lines to enable AppleGPU), it just works. It also seems like macOS guests just boot every time no problem, where on the stable build there were issues with them getting often stuck on an Apple logo and an empty loading bar.

Only one or two things to note: On the setup, it often gives a gray screen if it's loading something for a while. Also, it appears that Paravirtualized Graphics can be so unstable to a point where it crashes the Window Server entirely on the host Mac, but I've only had it happen once. However, if the VM is loading something heavy, it's very likely to freeze your host Mac's applications as well. 

Either way though, it does work absolutely better than nothing and it's good to know this isn't just a feature update for Win 11 support.

[SvenGus]

For me, with the latest Fusion Tech Preview (22H2) and on a Big Sur (Intel) host, Apple GPU paravirtualized graphics works flawlessly only with Big Sur as a guest (except for the occasional, random hang or kernel panic inside the VM, while booting it); while with Monterey and Ventura guests it still has several additional glitches (such as flickering, partly invisible (contextual) menus, Menu Bar and Dock visibility problems, and so on): not sure if this is due to my host system only supporting Metal 1, and/or the paravirtualized graphics driver still being experimental…?

[SvenGus]

… BTW, the competition’s product has exactly the same problems, with Monterey and Ventura guests.

[ColoradoMarmot]

I think that VMWare stopped development on it after Big Sur, so maybe the hooks aren't there for later OS's at all?

In any case, that's a nice discovery!

[gringley]

Given that Paravirtualized Graphics is the only way you can run Ventura on Intel are we going to see an update for these drivers?

[Mikero]

There are no drivers that we ship, it's just a part of macOS now. So when we present the appropriate virtual device to the VM, the VM uses the built-in drivers etc. to load up the paravirt stack.

Our role is just to present the right hardware and virtual config for it to the VM.

[gringley]

OK, hopefully that means the crash dumps I am uploading to Apple will get some action then? 

Then we can expect in the next release of Fusion that using PV graphics will be in the menu not a vmx edit?

As an update I tried updating one of my 12.4 images to 12.5 with Apple GPU enabled and sure enough it crashed and hung on reboot.