Bruno Castelló brunocastello

How to Force Enable 3D Acceleration in VMware Workstation/Fusion

Sometimes, when installing VMware Workstation Pro/Player on slightly dated or medium-low range PCs, you may encounter an annoying warning message during installation. This message informs you that your host does not support 3D acceleration, and proceeding with the installation will result in the same warning every time a virtual machine (VM) is started, with 3D effects being disabled.

This guide will show you how to resolve this issue by modifying the configuration file.

Problem Resolution

Boot SuperDuper! backup in VMWare Fusion

It's quite strange that VMWare doesn't expose this feature in the UI directly, but fortunately enough it's pretty easy to do.

Create a new custom virtual machine with macOS 10.14 as guest
Quit VMWare after creating the virtual machine
Change into the virtual machine folder ~/Virtual Machines/<name>.vmwarevm
Connect your external harddrive with your SuperDuper! bootable backup
Use diskutil list to figure out which device number your harddrive was assigned
Create a raw disk using the vmware-rawDiskCreator tool which is linked to the external harddrive:

	@echo off
	setlocal enabledelayedexpansion

	rem \| Lines beginning with 'rem' are comments

	rem -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

	rem \| "Icon Upscaler" Script by ThioJoe: https://github.com/ThioJoe
	rem \| I created this script specifically for upscaling very low res (such as 256x256) icons like those in Windows. It uses a combination of Image Magick (to first improve the transparency edges) and the RealCugan-ncnn-vulkan upscaler which seems to perform the best for this use case. Of course, the script can be used for all sorts of images, but I have found this to yield the best results of any other method, and better than just using an upscaler alone.

	#!/bin/bash
	#
	# [------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------]
	# [ modified from (legend!) Soldier of FORTRAN's script to work in my testing on Ubuntu 20.04 ]
	# [ intended, if it be the will of the demo gads, for a my talk entitled, ]
	# [ "the root password was klondike" at kernelcon 2022, https://kernelcon.org ]
	# [------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------]
	# [ stolen de: ]
	# [ https://gist.github.com/mainframed/2300903d9cc259a2a2ab431ca152dffc ]
	# [ also see: ]