Impossible to enable 3D acceleration

[Aurelien94]

Hi all,

I'm running VMWare Fusion 12.2 on Big Sur 11.6.1, and Sierra 10.2 as a guest, to allow 32-bit applications.

That's amost unusable because of the display is running very jerky. There's no 3D acceleration according to the VM settings.

I tried to add these combinaison lines inside the .vmx:

mks.enableMTLRenderer = "1"
mks.enableGLRenderer = "0"
mks.gl.allowBlacklistedDrivers = "TRUE"

--

mks.enableMTLRenderer = "0"
mks.enableGLRenderer = "1"
mks.gl.allowBlacklistedDrivers = "TRUE"

--

appleGPU0.present = "TRUE"
svga.present = "FALSE"

The last combinaison even prevent OS booting. Of course, I installed VMware tools, no change.

Any help appreciated. Thanks.

[gringley]

You are indeed asking the impossible.  Apple did not provide a usable framework for "3D acceleration" until Big Sur.  The AppleGPU parameter thus only works with Big Sur and Monterey guests and even then does not work all the time.  The other parameters below were workarounds to allow older MacOS hosts to keep using OpenGL instead of Metal with Fusion.  They do nothing for guests.

[Aurelien94]

Thanks for your feedback. So there's absoutely no workaround to get a smooth display for old guests from Big Sur?

[gringley]

To my knowledge nobody ever developed virtual 3D acceleration for MacOS prior to Big Sur.

[ColoradoMarmot]

No, it simply isn't possible.  Even on big sur it's still experimental.