Hello,
I have VMware Workstation Pro 14. My host system is running Win 8.1 and has a nVidia Quadro P2000 graphics card with the latest display driver. Everything's stable.
I have 3 100ppi monitors with the following characteristics:
Left: 1200 x 1600 pixels turned up sideways.
Center: 2650 x 1600 pixels in landscape orientation.
Right: 1200 x 1600 pixels turned up sideways.
When I run a Win 10 v1709 VM full-screen on the center monitor only, the desktop icon fonts look sharp and clean. When I switch to a layout using all monitors, what appears to be slightly inaccurate horizontal display occurs. Specifically, I'm talking about changing from Layout 1 to Layout 4 here:
This image shows a screen grab of a couple of icons on the desktop. You can see the difference where some pixels are doubled horizontally in the Layout 4 image below.
Here's the weird part:
Only the desktop image and icons seem to be affected. Text rendered inside a guest's window comes out fine.
It almost has to be Windows 10's fault, but on the other hand why would Windows 10 change the way things are displayed on the center monitor just because a couple of side monitors have been enabled?
I've turned off the "Automatically adjust user interface size in the virtual machine" checkbox because everything is always right at 100%. And I've made sure the Display Scale is 100% in the VM in all cases.
Any ideas what could be going wrong here?
-Noel
I just realized I still had the virtual hardware version at 11, and so updated it to version 14 with VM > Manage > Change Hardware Compatibility.
This has resolved the problem. Fonts and desktop imagery are now clean with the current version of VMware Tools.
-Noel
By the way, just so it's clear, everything is perfectly sharp and clean on my host system desktop spanning the 3 monitors. There's not a basic nVidia display driver problem nor any problem with the monitor interfaces.
Also, going back to "windowed" mode after using the guest in 3 monitor spanning mode yields strange behavior where the VMware window gets very tall (taller than the display) and only shows half the guest display. I'm starting to feel like this must really be a problem with large (wide) desktops and VMware Workstation Pro 14. To be clear this is what I see:
1. When I start up the VM, I start it in Windowed view where the desktop is 1920 x 1200, in a window that fits entirely on my center monitor.
2. I request full screen mode with the VMware button and everything changes to fit the 2560 x 1600 center monitor. At this point the desktop looks sharp and clean.
3. I request 3 monitor layout, and the guest desktop again changes to fit the 4960 x 1600 display space. Now the desktop background and icon fonts look slightly garbled, as I showed above.
4. When I switch back to 1 monitor layout, the guest desktop sizes back down to 2560 x 1600 and everything's sharp and clean again.
5. When I switch back to windowed layout, the VMware window does NOT go back to the size it was in step 1, but rather gets too tall and guest desktop ends up only half visible.
I can't help but think it must have to do with the fact that I have the side monitors turned up sideways - which works fine all the time when actually running the host or guest. Perhaps someone at VMware got the matrix math a little bit wrong for the transitions between modes?
-Noel
Thanks for the posting!
Would you please try with Win10 1703 VM if can works normally with your multimonitor layouts? If it can so you need to upgrade vmware tools to 10.2 which should solve the multimonitor issues on v1709. As I know the 10.2 would come release soon and you may download from vmware website.
Thanks for getting back to me Tracy.
I tried with my v1703 VM and did not see the icon font corruption. And the window, upon changing back from full-screen to windowed view, didn't end up with a half blanked-out display. That's hopeful.
I will be happy to try out the new version of VMware Tools. Do you happen to have a link from which I can get it? The Downloads portion of your site doesn't offer a 10.2 version, unless I've missed a "prelease" checkbox I needed to check, or maybe visit a different part of your web site. I didn't turn up a download for 10.2 with Google either.
Edit: Never mind, I misread your comment. 10.2 is not released yet. I will try the latest version from this folder:
Index of /45848/tools/releases/latest/windows
UPDATE
Version 10.1.15.6677369 does NOT resolve the problem:
-Noel
I just realized I still had the virtual hardware version at 11, and so updated it to version 14 with VM > Manage > Change Hardware Compatibility.
This has resolved the problem. Fonts and desktop imagery are now clean with the current version of VMware Tools.
-Noel
Note that this problem is NOT resolved by updating the VM to version 14 virtual hardware. Just the one where the pixels aren't properly aligned.
-Noel
FYI, the latter problem - corruption of the display after using full-screen, multi-monitor mode, appears to be corrected in 14.1.0 build-7370693.
Thank you!
-Noel
