With those tweaks applied, run your VMWare software and hit 'play' on your macOS virtual machine. At the same time, as an OS, it relies heavily on a real Mac's GPU for its hardware-accelerated desktop. The virtualized software's requests are 'parsed' by the virtual GPU driver and 'fed' to the actual GPU.Īnd that's precisely where the problem lies with the latest macOS: it doesn't come with such drivers for a virtualized GPU. Unlike the rest of the VM, it's not an emulated graphics system instead, the host machine's GPU performs the necessary calculations. The virtual GPU driver allows virtual machines under VMWare and VirtualBox to achieve smooth animations and playback. The Importance of the Virtual GPU Driver for Smoother Sailing It acts as a 'tunnel' that connects the virtual machine's software to the host machine's graphic driver.

Out of all these drivers, the most important one for a noticeable performance is the virtual GPU driver. One of the tasks those 'tools' perform is enabling some of those 'passthroughs' in the form of specialized drivers. If you've used VirtualBox or one of VMWare's solutions in the past, you've probably installed one of their 'tools' variants in a virtualized OS 'to make it perform better'.

Osx virtual machine