I'm running the game Mass Effect in VMWare Fusion 8.01. The game runs, and looks good, but play is very choppy. The game hesitates — sometimes fractionally, sometimes for a couple of seconds — when new scenery comes into view. Play smooths out for a bit until new scenery or new objects appear, and the stuttering resumes. And the audio has frequent popping and clicking.
It feels like the game is being forced to swap objects or textures in and out of RAM constantly, although I don't know if that is actually happening.
On a whim, I decided to try the demo of Parallels 11. I copied my Windows VM and converted the copy to Parallels. And to my surprise, the game is buttery smooth. It's as though it was a native Mac game. Virtually no stutters at all.
This surprised me because I have read that Fusion 8 was supposed to have leapfrogged Parallels in graphics performance. So my question: Is there anything I can do to improve the performance of the game in VMWare?
I ran the game again with performance logging enabled. The log file is attached.
The system:
Mac Pro 3,1 / Quad-core 2.8 GHz / 20 GB RAM
Mac OS X 10.11
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB VRAM
VMWare 8.0.1
Running Windows 10 32-bit
2 cores, 3 GB RAM assigned
Accelerate 3D graphics turned on, 1024 MB assigned for video RAM.
The screen resolution (both the Mac and the Windows) is set to 1360x768.
