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I can't turn on Windows Vista's aero feature in vmware workstation 17.5

  • 1.  I can't turn on Windows Vista's aero feature in vmware workstation 17.5

    Posted Jan 05, 2024 04:46 AM

    hello. I am unable to turn on the aero feature of windows vista in vmware workstation 17.5 as said in the title.
    My hostos is windows 10 22H2 and my guestos is windows vista (x86,x64).
    My vmware tools version is 10.3.5 build10430147.
    The CPU, GPU and RAM of my host OS is intel i5-4670, Geforce GTX760, 8GB RAM.
    I tried all the solutions mentioned in the links below, but they didn't work. I changed the hardware compatibility version to 15,10,9, but it didn't help. I also have the virtualization engine and 3D graphics settings turned on in the machine settings.
    The experience index score is 1.0 on the two graphics items, no matter how many times I try to measure it.
    I also obviously have vmware tools installed, and the index window keeps telling me that new hardware has been detected, even though I've done the scoring multiple times.

    And one peculiar thing is that the guestOS doesn't seem to recognize the network adapter properly, I couldn't connect to the internet with NAT settings, and when I tried to connect with a bridge, it connected successfully.

    Is this a bug in this software, I did the same thing a couple years ago and it worked fine.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHu8MKYVavc
    https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=34077



  • 2.  RE: I can't turn on Windows Vista's aero feature in vmware workstation 17.5
    Best Answer

    Posted Jan 05, 2024 05:27 AM

    The GTX 760 only support up to Feature level 11_0 and it is possible the slower much slower HD4600 in the i5-4570 is being used.

    A possible workaround is to use the OpenGL renderer instead of the default DX12Renderer that version 17.5.0 uses on Windows 10/11 hosts. Shut down the VM add/edit the following lines

    mks.enableDX12Renderer = "FALSE"
    mks.enableDX11Renderer = "FALSE"
    mks.enableGLRenderer = "TRUE"

    It should work for the GTX760 as Nvidia GPUs going as far back to Fermi supports OpenGL 4.6. A warning though: do not use the workaround with the Intel HD4600, there will likely be more rendering issues and not just slower graphics on Windows VMs. Try not to connect any monitor to the HD4600 or disable it altogether from the Device Manager. You can confirm the GLRenderer and GTX760 is used by looking at the mksSandbox.log file.

    As for hardware compatibility for an OS like Vista, you can go as high version 16 as it has DX11 support inside the guest; assuming there is DX11 installed inside the Vista VM.

    As for the NAT, there is post stating there problem of the NAT consuming a lot of CPU cycles on the host with version 17.5.