3d Acceleration for MacOS Guest

[techjd]

I understand that previously VMWare Fusion has not been able to support 3d acceleration with a Mac OS Guest running on a Mac OS Host.  The

Has anything improved in that area (e.g. possibilities opened up by Apple), or is this still the case for the foreseeable future?

[dariusd · Accepted solution]

Nothing has changed.  As much as I would like to bring happier news, we still do not provide support for 3D acceleration in macOS guests.  Sorry.

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Darius

[techjd]

I appreciate the quick response.  I understand -- things may not be practicable with what Apple provides.

[Rastafabisch]

Hello!

Are there any updates or announcements to make, now that macOS Big Sur provides API support for macOS guest acceleration on Big Sur hosts?

Best,

Rastafabisch

[wila]

Hi,

I guess you missed this?

https://www.vimalin.com/blog/fusion-12-0-metal-support/

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Wil

[Rastafabisch]

Thank you very much! I did miss this indeed. Having this in this thread now might be useful for others nonetheless.

[wila]

Agreed, not everybody follows this kind of news closely, but that doesn't mean they don't want to know 🙂
Can't wait for this to be officially supported.

Btw, I'll update my article as the minimum guest OS support is Big Sur (at least for now) so thanks for bringing it back to my attention.

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Wil

[ColoradoMarmot]

The Fusion team has clearly  been doing some serious plumbing work - between this and Mike's tweet about apple silicon, it promises to be an exciting few months.

[natonic77]

A whole bunch of older 32-bit software requiring accelerated graphics was left out in the cold with Catalina and a VM solution would be very welcome.

Would Apple's Paravirtualized Graphics Framework not provide the necessary API to accomplish this for older guests (10.14 and below)?  The description sure makes it sound like it would.

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

[wila]

Hi Natonic77,

That's a nice link.
Not sure where you are "reading between the lines" that it would come to older guests?

If you look in macOS Big Sur then you will find a kext that does the heavy lifting.
Excerpt from my article:

" (earlier macOS versions are missing the GPU paravirtual kernel extension for this – AppleParavirtGPU.kext. Unless apple steps in here and releases that for earlier macOS versions, it likely isn’t coming to earlier guest OS’s)"

I checked on earlier macOS versions and it's not there.
There's also other statements that I read that it would be unlikely for apple to backport the functionality needed to older OS's (it's not just the kernel extension, apparently it is also functionality needed in the metal API that wasn't available before BS)

Oh .. how I hope to be wrong on this 😉

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Wil

[natonic77]

Hi Wil,

Thanks for the reply.  After getting your reply I went back to the site and confirmed you are unfortunately correct.  I misread the “availability“ indicator.  I thought it said 10.11, but it says 11.0 (Big Sur).

 Sorry for the wild goose chase.