Fusion 13.5 - Nice and To-improve

[kube-man]

Fusion 13.5 finally a viable option on Apple Silicon and best platform for Linux - congratulations.  When running Windows 11 ARM, observations :

Legacy x86 application ran very well on the other platform, but super super slow on Fusion.   Same Windows 11 ARM, same 4CPUs/8Gb RAM, same MacBook Pro.  The emulation is done by Windows itself, so what are the possible reasons for the anomaly please?

Thank you!

[Technogeezer]

Without knowing the application, and exactly what's defines "super slow" it's hard to anyone (including VMware) to say why you're seeing a difference in performance.

 Fusion doesn't implement OpenGL for 3D acceleration - only DirectX 11 at this time.  If your application can use OpenGL, it may be falling back to using software implementations when running on Fusion - which could explain slowness.

If by the "other platform" you mean Parallels, they do support OpenGL. 

[kube-man]

Thanks, this is the application (no cost trial can be had) : https://www.shareinvestor.com/membership/plans_station.html

It does not use cutting edge tech at all and unchanged for more than ten years.  Was told no OpenGL used.  Unless information is incorrect, the slowness is baffling.  Slow - charts are drawn literally line by line instead of just appearing.  Super laggy pointer control.

And yes I use both Desktop and Fusion for years.

[Technogeezer · Accepted solution]

A couple of things off the top of my head you might want to look into.

There was one poster during the tech preview beta period that had an issue with an application running slowly for no apparent reason. One thing he tried was to turn off 3D acceleration and his application then ran much better. That's something to try and to see if it makes any difference.

One other user posted that he was seeing screen flickering and other anomalies. He checked to make sure that the shared graphics in memory setting the VM's Display setting was set to 8192 - the recommended setting. 

[kube-man]

Tried :

3D turned on, 8192 - problem remained.

3D off - usable!!

Thank you very much, appreciate!  Now from a curiosity perspective, why is this so please?

[kube-man]

Experimented further with a few legacy applications and these were my findings :

- Retina Off/3D Off, applications most responsive but overall experience feels retro - Windows 11 jerky and graphics not crisp.

- Retina On/3D Off - best compromise.

- Applications may be individually tuned further.  In this case : turned on Windows 8 Compatibility, DPI settings managed by System and Safe Emulation.  This combination seems to work best.

Your mileage may vary.  Have a good weekend.