3D acceleration will be disabled for VMs as DirectX 11.1 is not supported by the host

[WhiteKnight]

When I upgrade my VMware Workstation 16 installation from 16.2.0 to 16.2.1, I get an installation warning message displayed, telling me that "3D acceleration will be disabled for VMs as DirectX 11.1 is not supported by the host":

On my host, however, even the newer DirectX version 12 is installed:

What's the meaning of this error message? Does it make any sense or is it just displayed because some installer checks are not working properly?

[bluefirestorm]

What does the feature levels show in the Display tab?

If the installer is looking at the Sandy Bridge graphics, it will likely show 10_1 (which means DX10.1 features)

[WhiteKnight]

Thank you for your reply.

I'm admittedly not an expert in this area. As far as I can see the driver seems to support DirectX 11:

Yesterday, I updated to 16.2.2. The installer didn't show that message then. But I'm still curious to know what caused the above message.

[bluefirestorm]

It is missing 11_1 in the feature level. Feature 11_1 would be the DX11.1 that Workstation Pro installer is checking for.

For Nvidia, at least Maxwell Gen 2 or newer would support Feature Level 11_1. Maxwell Gen 1 supports up to feature level 11_0 only.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_levels_in_Direct3D#Direct3D_12

[bluefirestorm · Accepted solution]

I have a laptop with GTX960M (Maxwell Gen 1 so up to Feature Level 11_0 only) as render device with Intel HD 530 (has feature level up to 12_1) as display device. I did an update from 16.2.1 to 16.2.2 and I also didn't get the installation warning about 11.1 (maybe because it checked the HD530???). Ran a Windows 11 VM and it didn't disable the 3D acceleration despite that the render device supports up to feature level 11_0 only. Maybe the 3D acceleration check is not yet strict at power up of the VM.

If it does get strict about feature level 11_1 to have 3D acceleration for the VM some time in the future, you could try switching the VM to use GLRenderer by having these lines in the vmx configuration file. You might have to disable the Intel graphics at the Device Manager of the Windows 10 host just to ensure it uses the Nvidia card. The Intel graphics have some other problems when the GLRenderer is used.

mks.enableDX11Renderer = "FALSE"
mks.enableGLRenderer = "TRUE"

It appears the Nvidia GTS 450 supports OpenGL 4.6 so using the GLRenderer might be a viable, albeit unsupported VMware configuration on Windows 10/11 hosts.
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-gts-450.c1778

[WhiteKnight]

Thanks a lot for sharing this very helpful information with me!

[TekWizz]

The funny thing is that this issue never affected Version 16 at any revision, it was actively implemented starting in Version 17. I looked into this back when version 16.2 started issuing this warning, and it has to do with 11_0 vs. 11_1 "feature set" in the video card itself. You can have DX12 installed in Windows, but this has nothing to do with this. Specifically the video card need to support 11_1. I suppose that cards produced after 2015 do support this, but prior cards may not.

Anyway I took the time to compare the last version which didn't complain about this which was v16.1.2, (after this v16.2 came out) and the last of the v16's which was v16.2.5, the last before v17 and using a benchmark test running in a Windows 10 VM, there was no difference in 3D performance. However testing the same in v17 cause an EXTREME slowdown, so instead of getting frame-rates as low as 4 FPS with acceleration, this was reduced by maybe a factor of 10. So to get 3D acceleration in Version 17, you need to obtain a more modern GPU which supports the 11_1 feature set.

I don't know why they did this because they do claim the software supports all versions of DX. It forces people to purchase newer hardware for no real good reason, which adds a lot of waste to the environment unless these items are resold. Why is it not possible to still enable 3D acceleration with older cards, can't be that much "extra code overhead". I'm not a programmer so I don't know, but I think humanity needs to be more careful about waste before we destroy the planet and our quality of life completely by being wasteful.

I'm attaching screenshots of my test results.

2D and 3D performance of v16.1.2

2D and 3D performance of v16.2.5