video Ram stuck at 4MB, what now?

[NoobforVM]

VMware workstation1 6 player
windows 10 pro host
windows 10 pro guest
gpu 2080ti
ram 128gb
cpu 8700k

I changed the vrram size in the vmx file, nothing.. machine still uses 4mb.

it says shared memory around 3000mb but Display memory VRAM only 4mb.

Photoshop does not work, chrome display badly.

What now?

PLease help...

[seregg]

Or maybe you can at least visually change the number 4194304 (4MB Win 10) and 134217728 (128MB Win 7)? so you can cheat programs.

also in version 16, mksSandbox.exe appeared which loads the processor by about 1/3 of the running machine and it is duplicated with each running machine.

[banackm]

We'd love to make that number report higher if we could, yeah.... Our development team may yet find a clever solution here.

The mksSandbox.exe now runs most of the graphics workload for the VM.  So it shouldn't be doing any extra work from what we did in prior versions, it's just moved out of the vmx process and into this new one.

[Mongo424242]

Hi,

I would like to add my voice to the cacophony of users encountering video-related problems due to the inability to increase the dedicated video memory.  One of the reasons I upgraded my Workstation was for the DirectX support (which is advertised on the download page as supporting all kinds of graphical applications, including games), but I am seeing an increasing number of applications crash to the desktop due to insufficient video memory.  As was pointed out, VMs are becoming more and more ubiquitous in the computing world, and I would hope that this would be a priority to implement in general (as opposed to the "band-aid" approach of going app to app).

That being said, I can certainly appreciate the complexities involved, and I want to thank the VMWare teams for moving forward on this.

Mongo

[banackm]

If you can post the specific applications you were running, and what the error/crash was, we'd love to investigate them.

[Mongo424242]

Hi banackm,

Thanks for your response.  In my case, I cannot get photoshop to launch (it just sits there thinking about it) same as the OP.  Also, I am starting to see more and more games fail, when I have others from the same era that work fine.  The 800 lb gorilla in the room here is "Alien: Isolation," and my Windows 7 VM is more than up to the system requirements, except for the dedicated video memory (the minimum specs call for 1 GB; I have specified 2GB under "settings", and yet it only shows 128MB).  When I try and launch it, it just goes to a black screen for a couple of seconds, then tells me that "AI.exe has stopped working."  Based on my Google research, that either results from an out-of-date video driver (my VM tools are current), or it has a problem with the video hardware itself.  Granted, it's only one application (game), and I can use both it and photoshop on my bare-metal Windows 7 box for the time being, but I fear that this will only become more prevalent.

[banackm]

Are you running on the latest HWversion?  See if you can upgrade the VM by going:

VM -> Manage -> Change Hardware Compatibility...

And then select the latest hardware version.

I'm wondering because if you're seeing 128MB, that suggests you might actually be running with our older virtual hardware that doesn't support D3D11 yet, which that game lists as a minimum requirement.  Newer hardware versions would normally lower that to 4MB (as far as Windows reports the dedicated memory), and then allow you to set the overall graphics memory larger than 2GB.  Both the higher graphics API support and the higher graphics memory would probably help the game.

If that's still not working for you after the upgrade, if you can post a vmware.log from your attempt to run the game that would help us see your system configuration as well.

But I'll see if our development team can take a look.

[Mongo424242]

Hi banackm,

I am indeed running on the latest hardware version (16.2.x).  My system specs are as follows:

Host: Ubuntu 20.04, Intel i5-7500 @ 3.4GHz (quad core), 32 GB RAM, Nvidia GTX 1050ti

Guest: Windows 7 SP 1 (dual core), 8GB RAM, 2GB video RAM (attempted...)

Based on my reading elsewhere on this form, my understanding is that the 4MB thing started with Windows 10 guests (I am using Windows 7 SP1).  Attached is a vmware.log file from an attempted execution, as well as the error dump from the "AI.exe has stopped working" message box.  Thanks for looking into this!

[jamesalbert]

yo yo, I also wanted to voice the issues I'm having re vram. Granted, I'm still learning 🙂

As opposed to most folks here, I'm trying to run a video game. 

Win10 host graphics hw:

rtx 3090
- total available graphics mem: ~90Gb
- dedicated video memory: ~25Gb
- shared system mem: ~65Gb

I set my Win10 VM to use the max 8Gb graphics memory (along with 32Gb ram, 16 processors).

I was hoping this would just work and it does initially run fairly smooth (at least smooth enough for basic play). But over time (around 30-40 minutes of just letting the game run), it gets really sluggish to the point where it's unplayable. cpu, ram, network all look find in resource monitor.

I can't really speak to the root cause though. Task manager is saying my game is using 0% of the GPU, granted I'm fairly inexperienced when it comes to hardware.

I feel like I have more than enough hw for vmware to take and use for a video game with ultra low graphics settings.

some other specs:

vmware workstation version: 16.2.4
vm hardware compatibility: Workstation 16.2.x (should I be using ESXi 7.0?)

[seregg]

Did the problem change in version 17?