Optimal VM settings for games in Fusion 6 and Win 7?

[dmedVM]

I'm trying to determine the optimal settings for my running my VM for games on my iMac and would like some help determining if I need to make any changes to my set up.

My current setup is:

2013 27" iMac

3.2 GHz

8GB Ram

NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M 1024 MB OSX 10.9.1

1 TB Fusion HD

I've installed VMware Fusion 6 with Win 7 x64 as the guest OS

The current VM settings are:

using 2 cores

memory, 5632

Accelerate 3d graphics is on

HD virtual disk is set to 100GB (but the C drive in Win still shows 60GB?)

I have installed VMware tools which loaded an alternate graphics driver bur I can't figure out which driver.

The game I'm most interested in running is Skyrim V Elder Scrolls. This runs great on my Mac Book Pro with boot camp but is pretty choppy in the VM. I know it won't be perfect but I'm sure I can at least get it to be playable.

My questions are, what should I change to get the best performance for games ion the VM? I don't leave the VM running except to play a game so I don't care if it takes performance away from the Mac OS while its on. I'd like to know how to enlarge the actual C drive to match the virtual HD space I gave it, and how I can tell if I am running the most appropriate graphics driver?

Any advice or help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

David

[ColoradoMarmot]

You've just about done what you can.  I'd change it to 4GB for the guest though - best to not starve the host, and Mavericks really does like having 4GB for itself.  There's no way to modify/change/update the graphics drivers in windows, since the guest doesn't have direct access to the hardware.  You should turn off Unity and mirrored folders though, and run the VM in full screen mode for best performance.

To change the HD space, you'll need to use the windows disk manager (I forget the exact name) to expand the disk inside the OS.

[koi]

In addition to what you've tried and what dlhotka has suggested, the only things I can think of are to make sure you're not running anything else on the host (especially anything that might use 3D), preallocating the virtual disk (and defragmenting the host), and trying out different graphics options within your game. There's not really a lot of possible knobs to tweak. If these don't help, you could also try one of the competing virtualization platforms - various quirks might cause a particular host/guest/virtualization software/game combination to happen to work better, but there's no way to know without trying.

Personally, modern games are the one thing I don't run in a virtual machine.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Yep, I either wait for a mac version, or wait for a couple of generations of hardware and Fusion to catch up to the performance needed.

One note - no need to defrag the host if it's an SSD or Fusion drive - it'll just wear out the SSD.