HOWTO: Enabling Accelerated 3D for a Virtual Machine in VMWare 5.0

[sizzam]

This is from the VMWare manual:

To enable a virtual machine for accelerated 3-D

1. Choose a virtual machine with Windows 2000 or XP guest operating system.

Note: Do not enable Direct3D on a virtual machine that is powered on or suspended.

2. Add the following to the configuration (.vmx) file for the virtual machine:

mks.enable3d = TRUE

This line enables accelerated 3-D on the host. It is required to support accelerated 3-D in the guest and also enables the host to accelerate 2-D portions of the guest display.

3. You may also add one or both of the following optional lines:

svga.vramSize = 67108864

This line increases the amount of VRAM on the virtual display card to 64 MB. Adding more VRAM helps to reduce thrashing in the guest. The maximum value is 128 MB.

vmmouse.present = FALSE

This line disables the absolute pointing device in the guest. Applications which require DirectInput relative mode need to turn off the absolute pointing device in the guest. In practice, this is only required for a certain class of full screen 3-D applications (for example, real-time games like first-person shooters).

Note: If you set the vmmouse.present option, you should also turn off the preference for motion ungrabbing in the Input tab of the Preferences settings dialog.

To turn off ungrabbing for vmouse.present:

a. Choose Edit > Preferences.

b. Click Input.

c. Deselect Ungrab when cursor leaves window.

*****EDIT - More info ******
Not all aspects of 3-D acceleration are enabled. The following 3-D features are not accelerated:
# Pixel and vertex shaders
# Multiple vertex streams
# Hardware bump-mapping, environment mapping
# Projected textures
# Textures with one, three, or four dimensions

[krye]

Excellent! When i've just installed vmware5 on my machine, only to avoid rebooting to windows when I need to use photoshop and dreamweaver

Thanks!

[greythorne]

so now if i want to put the vid memory to 128mb then what the value will be?

thnx

[krye]

That would be... 128 megabytes = 134 217 728 bytes

[kakashi]

does this work for the new beta vmware server (its free so i only use it)

[Stormbringer]

Well ... here's a possible showstopper on AMD64 systems with NVIDIA graphic cards (I'm running VMware Wks 5.5.1 build 19175 on Breezy AMD64).

You added the following lines to your <virtualmachine>.vmx file:

mks.enable3d = "TRUE"
svga.vramSize = "67108864" (or "134217728")

As soon as you start the VM you get an error saying the 3d acceleration cannot be used because of a problem with libnvidia-tls.so.1

Reason: unknown (only Nvidia may know the answer)
Source: VMware opens the 32-Bit TLS library (instead of the 64-Bit one) ... and here seems to be a catch.

Open a terminal and type ...

# sudo mv /usr/lib32/tls/libnvidia-tls.so.1.0.<version> /usr/lib32/tls/libnvidia-tls.so.1.0.<version>.backup
# sudo cp /usr/lib32/libnvidia-tls.so.1.0.<version> /usr/lib32/tls

Replace <version> with the version number of the Nvidia driver that's installed on your box ... here's an example for v87.56 ...

# sudo mv /usr/lib32/tls/libnvidia-tls.so.1.0.8756 /usr/lib32/tls/libnvidia-tls.so.1.0.8756.backup
# sudo cp /usr/lib32/libnvidia-tls.so.1.0.8756 /usr/lib32/tls

That's it ... exit the terminal, fire up VMware, start the VM ... the error should be gone and 3d acceleration should be available.

Hope this information is useful ...

Storm.

[imagine]

does this work for the new beta vmware server (its free so i only use it)

Not really, because VMware Server uses a remote console to access the virtual machine. Servers don't need 3D acceleration.

[MASTERTUHO]

GUYS YOUR AMAZING!!!!!!!!
now i can game at school

now school is more fun

but i have 1 question.
How can i calculate the code foor more MB for the VM graphic

if you can tell me then post it here pls

me beg you

SIGNED BY MASTERTUHO

[Crashmaxx]

Anyway to get this to work with vmware server? It says "3d back-end not enabled" or something like that. Don't see why it won't work, basically the same as vmware, but with more.

[aroswald1977]

Anyway to get this to work with vmware server? It says "3d back-end not enabled" or something like that. Don't see why it won't work, basically the same as vmware, but with more.

same here:

Direct rendering is not available.
Failed to construct 3-D rendering backend. The 3-D features of the display card will be disabled.