Citrix Viewer incompatible with "Accelerate 3D Graphics" option

[kaz219]

Enabling "Accelerated 3D Graphics" in Fusion will render Citrix Viewer inside a Windows VM completely unusable. This is a long standing issue: Fusion and Citrix performance terrible (as in not even able to reboot VM)

Disabling "Accelerate 3D Graphics" has obviously some CPU side effects, which not everyone can live with.

I am not clear on whether it's a Citrix or a VMware issue to be honest.

[Alex_Romeo]

Hi,

Also open a post in the Citrix community, so you can know if any user solved it on the Citrix side.

Forums - Discussions

ARomeo

[joserfonseca]

kaz219​

I enrolled on Citrix 72h demo, and tried to reproduce the issue, but perhaps because I'm in UK while the demo servers seem to be in US, quality is pretty bad either way: w/ 3D, w/o 3D, and even when I run on a physical Windows machine.

Can you describe exactly what are the worst symptoms you see? What app and operations do you do?  What happens?

If you can reply within the next 48hrs it would be useful, as my demo will expire after that.

[kaz219]

Posted in Citrix forums as well:
https://discussions.citrix.com/topic/410970-citrix-viewer-is-incompatible-with-vmware-fusion-3d-grap...

[kaz219]

I connect Citrix Viewer to the remote HVD, then it is responsible for a couple of seconds, becomes slower and slower, every click takes longer to be perceived, even mouse cursor are detected after 5, 10, 20s, etc. until the entire Windows VM (the one running inside Fusion) becomes completely unresponsive. It takes less than 20s from connecting Citrix to the HVD until the Fusion VM is completely unresponsive.

The Fusion menus themselves work fine, the mac is fine, Task Manager of the Windows VM shows low CPU and low memory usage. Task Manager in the remote HVD also shows not particular load. Then my only recourse is to select "restart the VM" in the Fusion menus, which is does instantly, no delay.

It seems it's only interaction with the GUI of Windows in Fusion which becomes unusably slow the moment I connect Citrix. Just launching Citrix without connecting it to a remote HVD does not cause any issue.

[joserfonseca]

Thank you.  I could reproduce the ever growing mouse latency.  We have a few leads on what could be the problem which we are now exploring.

One final question: Citrix also provides Workspace for mac on  https://www.citrix.com/en-gb/downloads/workspace-app/mac/ .  Is there a particular reason/advantage to prefer/use the Windows version?

[kaz219]

Until last month, there was not VDI client/plugin for Mac for Cisco Jabber and Zoom, it was Windows only. Even now, my company hasn't rolled out the right version to support Zoom VDI on Mac yet.

I assume there must be a bunch of other VDI plugins which are Windows-only...

[joserfonseca]

I see.  I wasn't aware of these differences in plugin support.  Thanks.

[alvario]

Thanks for mentioning this. It Really helps

[philma1]

I experience the same issue on a Windows 10 host with vmWare workstation (latest version). Citrix workspace inside guest is not usable with 3D acceleration. and the issue is getting worse over time.

There are some other threads on the web about this, it would be great if it could be fixed !

[DrKarol]

I can confirm the same situation here with latest Windows 10 (both host and guest), VMware Workstation 16.1.1, and latest Citrix Workspace 21.3.  With 3D Acceleration on for the VM, Citrix performance is abysmal, while all other apps work really well.  With 3D Acceleration disabled, Citrix works much better, but this negatively impacts performance of several other of my apps.  It would be great if someone from VMware worked together with someone from Citrix to resolve this long standing issue.  The Internet has discussion threads on this for the past 3 years, but there is still no improvement.

[dlavor]

I can confirm, that running the latest configuration possible (VMware Workstation 16 Pro and Citrix Workspace) still do not solve the problem. Remote VM is completely unusable with 3D Acceleration turned on within guest VM.

[mlkovacs]

I had the same issue, which appeared after I migrated to a new Mac with a newer version of Fusion.  I had "Accelerate 3D Graphics" option selected.  After de-selecting the "Accelerate 3D Graphics" option in Fusion, the issue went away.