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Dryne
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Guest Display Broken With Accelerate 3D Graphics Enabled

VMWare Workstation 16.2.3 build-19376536--

The display does not appear correctly when Accelerate 3D Graphics is enabled.  Here is a screenshot showing Microsoft Edge under Windows 10 not displaying the menu at all.  When I turn off Accelerate 3D Graphics, this issue goes away.  I have never seen anything good with the addition of this feature.  I find it buggy and useless.

vmware_fubar.png

 

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5 Replies
bluefirestorm
Champion
Champion

It is a problem that has been around for sometime (maybe since version 14.x) for anything that is based on Chromium (so it could happen to something like Visual Studio Code). But more specifically something to do with ANGLE graphics as another thread post showed that it affected Viber (which appears to written with Qt framework which uses ANGLE graphics).

A few possible workarounds:
(1) disable 3D accelerated graphics on the VM
(2) disable browser hardware acceleration or edge://flags/#use-angle and change from Default to something else (which can also disable browser acceleration) as seen on edge://gpu or chrome://gpu
(3) switch from DX11Renderer to GLRenderer for the VM. (add the lines to the vmx configuration)
mks.enableDX11Renderer = "FALSE"
mks.enableGLRenderer = "TRUE"

It is quite reasonable to not like (1) as 3D accelerated graphics might be necessary for other applications within the VM.
Some find (2) to be acceptable but some still whinge about it.
(3) seems to work as the problem did not/does not seem to occur on VMs that run on Linux hosts (which used GLRenderer as default prior to the recent switch VulkanRenderer) and macOS Fusion hosts (which also used GLRenderer prior to switching to Metal). So far all the posts with these Chrome/Edge rendering problems appears to be on VMs running on Windows hosts.

But some people still whinge about (3) workaround. Well, it is either continue on whinging or get on it.

A note of workaround (3), it might get worse for an Intel integrated graphics for Windows VMs (affects login page and so on) so only recommended for Nvidia GPUs (I don't have a Windows OS running with an AMD GPU, I would have to fiddle around with Windows Bootcamp with a Macbook Pro for that).

 

 

quantumburnz
Contributor
Contributor

I'm experiencing/seeing the same issues as @Dryne . I tried Option (3) proposed by @bluefirestorm and it made things worse. I attached a picture of the Start Menu after making the changes to the vmx config file.

  • VMWare Workstation version 16.2.3 build-19376536
  • Microsoft Windows 10 Pro - 10.0.19044 N/A Build 19044
  • Intel(R) UHD Graphics version 27.20.100.9664 dated 6/1/2021
  • Tried both VMWare Tools 11.3.5 as well as 12.0.0
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designfusion_jb
Contributor
Contributor

I also am having this issue. I work for a company that does Windows app development and we have 15 seats of VMware 16.2.3. Ever since the last few weeks, we are all experiencing graphics glitches. The host is Windows 10 21H1 and the guest is also Win 10 21H1. VMtools is 11.3.5. Turning off 3d acceleration does fix it but is not a good fix as this slows down our other apps. 

I did find a partial solution on the MS website.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/edge-transparent-menus/m-p/3198790

This site also helped.
https://github.com/light-tracer/issues/issues/1

 

 

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Primality
Contributor
Contributor

I think I figured out how to solve this.

Open up "System Properties" (sysdm.cpl), go to "Advanced", then go to "Settings" under the "Performance" section.

Uncheck the box that says "Show shadows under windows".

It seems to be the thing that fixed broken rendering of window components in VMware workstation Windows guests.