VMWare Player - increase 3D performance on XP guest

0

Ive set up a Windows XP (SP2) Guest machine. I want to use it to play some old games. But here is the problem: 3D works baaaaaad. Most of the time I get only one to five fps. And this in games created for windows 98! Are there any ways to improve the 3D performance?

My system:

  • Windows 10 Pro x64
  • AMD Ryzen 3 1300X
  • AMD Radeon RX 590
  • 16 GB DDR4 RAM

My settings for the VM:

  • OS: Windows XP Professional with SP2 x86
  • 4 GB Ram
  • Cores: 2
  • Hard disk: 50 GB
  • Monitor: Accelerate 3D graphics enabled, 1 GB graphics memory
  • VMWare Tools is installed

What I allready did / tried:

  • Defragment the drive (shouldnt affect 3D but you allway scan try ;) )
  • Remove all unused devices (e.g. network adapter)
  • Increase the graphics memory (none of my games need more than 8 MB)

Thank you for any advise!

BDevGW

Posted 2019-04-30T16:46:46.040

Reputation: 73

1A Virtual Machine is NOT to play games, unless you can 1. Use a reasonable amount of memory and 2. Can passthrough one of the graphics cards. – None – 2019-04-30T16:52:23.133

Is this possible with Workstation Player? The problem is that I dont have any other option to play this old games or is there a better way than with a vm? – BDevGW – 2019-04-30T16:53:50.170

As long as you don't connected a XP to the internet also in a VM, of course, you may try dual booting but that's a problem because XP can't be installed in UEFI mode. You'd have to enable CSM (Legacy) and dual boot from the firmware. Better to watch some retrocomputing videos and learn how to get a dedicated machine for that, preferably with era appropriate hardware. Modern hardware really requires current OSes because of hardware support. – None – 2019-04-30T17:04:09.503

VMWare Workstation Player nor Windows XP supports VT-d/AMD-d and GPU Passthrough which would be required to improve the performance. – Ramhound – 2019-04-30T17:09:15.017

Well then Ill have to ask for the old PC from my parrents... But as a last hope, if I would pass a GPU to the VM, would it let the games run "normal"? And according to Ramhounds post, is there a free alternative VM tool which supports passthrough? – BDevGW – 2019-04-30T17:13:43.663

No answers