Current State of 3D Hardware Acceleration on macOS Guest VMs

[Yebubbleman]

Running versions of macOS in a VM (running on an actual Apple Mac, of course ) is a big part of what I am going to be doing on a Mac. ( I work in IT and doing testing in VMs before rolling things out to actual systems will be key for me going forward. That being said, the one thing that Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion seem to do just fine for virtualizing Windows boxes is 3D graphics acceleration. This has been sorely lacking when it comes to virtualized macOS boxes. Though, admittedly, it has been a long while since I last did this (I think I last had a VM running the developer beta of OS X Mountain Lion).

My question is, has this improved at all since then? I vaguely remember reading somewhere that VMware now supports 3D acceleration in Fusion so long as both the host and guest operating systems are Big Sur or newer. But that's all the hubbub I'm familiar with. I've heard nothing to indicate that it's available for guests running anything earlier than Big Sur. Does anyone have any knowledge about this? 3D acceleration (even for basic OS effects) would be nice.

Similarly, if anyone knows anything that might indicate how this situation might be on Apple Silicon Macs, I'd love to hear it as well!

Thanks!

 

[Ritsuka]

Only available for Big Sur when running VMware on Big Sur.

 

[Yebubbleman]

Only available for Big Sur when running VMware on Big Sur.

Nothing on Parallels Desktop? Is there any indication that this will be similar on Apple Silicon (for Apple Silicon versions of macOS) with Apple Silicon versions of Fusion and/or Desktop?

 

[Tech198]

Running versions of macOS in a VM (running on an actual Apple Mac, of course ) is a big part of what I am going to be doing on a Mac. ( I work in IT and doing testing in VMs before rolling things out to actual systems will be key for me going forward. That being said, the one thing that Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion seem to do just fine for virtualizing Windows boxes is 3D graphics acceleration. This has been sorely lacking when it comes to virtualized macOS boxes. Though, admittedly, it has been a long while since I last did this (I think I last had a VM running the developer beta of OS X Mountain Lion).

My question is, has this improved at all since then? I vaguely remember reading somewhere that VMware now supports 3D acceleration in Fusion so long as both the host and guest operating systems are Big Sur or newer. But that's all the hubbub I'm familiar with. I've heard nothing to indicate that it's available for guests running anything earlier than Big Sur. Does anyone have any knowledge about this? 3D acceleration (even for basic OS effects) would be nice.

Similarly, if anyone knows anything that might indicate how this situation might be on Apple Silicon Macs, I'd love to hear it as well!

Thanks!

You should instead be asking "What is the state of performance of MacOS VM" to which the answer would be "Not very good".

I don't expect hardware graphics to be any better if they can't even get the performance right and ,instead, favor the bigger market (Windows) for such tasks.

It explains why graphics enchantments in a VM for Mac Guests always was on the downward spiral from the start. I try my best and avoid running it like this, like the plague. Not sure if Parallels fills that gap, but when one company does it e.g. VMWare, i assume they all tend to favor the larger.

 

[Yebubbleman]

You should instead be asking "What is the state of performance of MacOS VM" to which the answer would be "Not very good".

I don't expect hardware graphics to be any better if they can't even get the performance right and ,instead, favor the bigger market (Windows) for such tasks.

It explains why graphics enchantments in a VM for Mac Guests always was on the downward spiral from the start. I try my best and avoid running it like this, like the plague. Not sure if Parallels fills that gap, but when one company does it e.g. VMWare, i assume they all tend to favor the larger.

Are you factoring VMware's support for acceleration of Big Sur VMs when running Fusion on Big Sur hosts?

Certainly, I know in the past that support has been piss poor. But, at some point, especially with AWS supporting macOS instances (hosted on 2018 Intel and soon-to-be 2020 M1 Mac minis), I'd imagine that this will improve.

For now, my needs for this are personal in nature. But I'd be lying if I said that the idea of a Mac Pro tower hosting a crapton of various macOS guests doesn't have appeal to me.

 

[Yebubbleman]

Are you factoring VMware's support for acceleration of Big Sur VMs when running Fusion on Big Sur hosts?

Certainly, I know in the past that support has been piss poor. But, at some point, especially with AWS supporting macOS instances (hosted on 2018 Intel and soon-to-be 2020 M1 Mac minis), I'd imagine that this will improve.

For now, my needs for this are personal in nature. But I'd be lying if I said that the idea of a Mac Pro tower hosting a crapton of various macOS guests doesn't have appeal to me.

Worst case scenario, I'm hopeful that this is one of those things that will either be better on Apple Silicon Macs or both, as time goes on.

 

[Tech198]

Are you factoring VMware's support for acceleration of Big Sur VMs when running Fusion on Big Sur hosts?

Certainly, I know in the past that support has been piss poor. But, at some point, especially with AWS supporting macOS instances (hosted on 2018 Intel and soon-to-be 2020 M1 Mac minis), I'd imagine that this will improve.

For now, my needs for this are personal in nature. But I'd be lying if I said that the idea of a Mac Pro tower hosting a crapton of various macOS guests doesn't have appeal to me.

Yes i am...

There issue nothing anyone can tell me that Mac Guests will be on par with Windows performance.. because that has never happened.

I'm not saying Big Sur isn't got improvements in VM, nor VMWare not better supporting it specifically, but i'd be hard pressed to find any Mac guess a matching performance a Windows system under same conditions.

 

[Yebubbleman]

Yes i am...

There issue nothing anyone can tell me that Mac Guests will be on par with Windows performance.. because that has never happened.

I'm not saying Big Sur isn't got improvements in VM, nor VMWare not better supporting it specifically, but i'd be hard pressed to find any Mac guess a matching performance a Windows system under same conditions.

I don't think that's necessarily up for debate here. I'm just wondering how it has changed since the 10.7/10.8 days which is when I last did it. Running Mac guests is something I'm going to be needing to do and I'm wondering what the immediate (and forecasted) future of doing so looks like. The fact that Big Sur via VMware (on Big Sur hosts) is improved is promising, despite not being what virtualizing a Windows client is like.

 

[hoodafoo]

I'm on Catalina and running Big Sur in a VM and it is SLOWWW! I have a High Sierra VM and it runs just fine (other than annoying accidentally double-clicks) Am I doing something wrong? Maybe wrong setting somewhere? My Big Sur VM is totally unusable at the moment