3D Acceleration for VMWare Player

I noticed a message saying that I did not have 3d acceleration in my virtual image with VMWare player. I didn’t really need it as all I was doing was using the PeopleSoft IDE and a web browser, but I wondered if it would improve performance. I will probably never know if it made a difference other than get rid of the message.

The fix was to install driconf and enable “S3TC texture compression even if software support is not available”.

Installing driconf was as easy as:
sudo apt-get install driconf

Run driconf from the command line with the command:
driconf

Go to the “Image Quality” tab, and click “Yes” for “Enable S3TC texture compression even if software support is not available”

driconf

Resources

3D Acceleration on Intel X3100

4 thoughts on “3D Acceleration for VMWare Player

  1. Hi, just a little query. I’m running Ubuntu 10.04 under 64-bit Windows 7. My laptop is equipped with an i3 processor and an ATI Radeon hd 5730.

    I use VMware for virtualization. 3d acceleration isn’t available in my Ubuntu. Will your fix work to enable 3d acceleration in this situation?

    Reason I’m asking is I’m a dedicated gamer and one who uses graphics apps a lot. Not having good graphics is a real downer, and will put me off Linux if I can’t solve this problem.

    I really don’t want to use VirtualBox; it messes up your system.

    Any help REALLY appreciated!!

  2. Unfortunately, I think I am the opposite of you. I have a Ubuntu host, and I use VMWare virtual images of Windows Server in order to run PeopleSoft on my machine.

    The driconf tool I was talking about was loaded on my host to enable 3D support for the virtual images. I would assume that you have to do something similar in the Windows host to allow VMWare to provide 3D accelaration to it’s virtual machines.

    One thing that you might check is that the most recent VMWare tools is installed in your Ubuntu image.

  3. Thanks!!

    At least now I know that its basically impossible to get a Linux virtual machine to be 3d accelerated.

    Guess I’ll have to wait till VMware comes up with a solution. That’s what everyone else says anyways.

    Cheers!

  4. Replying to an old thread because this is where I landed on a search for the same problem in 2014, on VMWare Player 6; host: Haswell/Intel HD4000 hardware running Ubuntu Trusty, using standard (open-source, mesa) drivers, trying to run a Windows 7 VM copied across from VMWare Fusion.

    The above solution didn’t work for me, though it appears to have done no harm. (I don’t know if it was still a required step, but I just needed another as well.)

    On checking vmware.log I saw this (yes, three times):

    2014-03-17T10:47:55.017Z| mks| I120: Disabling 3D on this host due to presence of Mesa DRI driver. Set mks.gl.allowBlacklistedDrivers = TRUE to override.
    2014-03-17T10:47:55.019Z| mks| I120: Disabling 3D on this host due to presence of Mesa DRI driver. Set mks.gl.allowBlacklistedDrivers = TRUE to override.
    2014-03-17T10:47:55.021Z| mks| I120: Disabling 3D on this host due to presence of Mesa DRI driver. Set mks.gl.allowBlacklistedDrivers = TRUE to override.

    So following that I appended this to the end of the .vmx file and restarted:

    mks.gl.allowBlacklistedDrivers = TRUE

    I still get a warning on next starting the VM, but that can be turned off in the normal way. (“Never show this dialog again.”) So far it seems to be working, though I’m admittedly not really stressing it. I just wanted the standard Windows 7 desktop effects to work, and it seems to have done that.

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