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stattman
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3D Acceleration not supported on Guest Operating System

Hi Forum,

I created a new Fusion VM to run Mac OSX Sierra 10.12. So far so good.

However when looking at the Display Settings, I've enabled 3D acceleration but there's a warning "3D Acceleration is not supported for the current guest operating system"

As I'm running the VM as a development environment with 3D software I'm at a loss as to how to proceed. Unless I should use an earlier OSX version?

Does VMWare have any plans to support VM Ware Fusion 8.5.6 with this feature?

Thanks for any advice.

Kind Regards

Mark

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dariusd
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As far as I'm aware, there are still no virtualization products at all with support for accelerated 3D graphics for macOS guests (or OS X, or Mac OS X).  Apple does not provide any driver API for 3rd-party development of accelerated graphics capabilities, because each version of macOS already includes all the graphics drivers for every Macintosh hardware platform supported by that release, covering ATI/AMD, Nvidia and Intel GPUs.

Apple's 3D software renderer should still be available inside your macOS virtual machine, although its capabilities and performance will be quite limited compared to what which would be available through hardware acceleration.

It'd sure be nice to be able to add 3D graphics support for macOS guests, and we've had numerous requests for it in the past, but there's no progress to report so far.

Cheers,

--

Darius

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dariusd
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As far as I'm aware, there are still no virtualization products at all with support for accelerated 3D graphics for macOS guests (or OS X, or Mac OS X).  Apple does not provide any driver API for 3rd-party development of accelerated graphics capabilities, because each version of macOS already includes all the graphics drivers for every Macintosh hardware platform supported by that release, covering ATI/AMD, Nvidia and Intel GPUs.

Apple's 3D software renderer should still be available inside your macOS virtual machine, although its capabilities and performance will be quite limited compared to what which would be available through hardware acceleration.

It'd sure be nice to be able to add 3D graphics support for macOS guests, and we've had numerous requests for it in the past, but there's no progress to report so far.

Cheers,

--

Darius

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stattman
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Thanks Darius.

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natonic77
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Sorry to jump in on this several years later, but I'm not sure if the Paravirtualized Graphics Framework was available back when this conversation occurred. Would Apple's Paravirtualized Graphics Framework not provide the necessary API to accomplish this?  The description sure makes it sound like it would.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/paravirtualizedgraphics?language=objc&changes=latest_minor

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natonic77
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Well that was a short lived hope.  I misread apple’s docs.  This feature is new to Big Sur - I thought it was available as of 10.11 (rather than 11.0).

 Sorry for the confusion

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