How to make VS 2010 Beta2 Faster in VMWare

Question

If you’re running Visual Studio 2010 in a VMWare virtual machine, you may see some UI display issues and poor performance, especially in the text editor.  This is a known issue with VMWare’s accelerated display device support, and the good news is that the problem is simple to fix.  You can disable hardware acceleration by creating the registry value HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Avalon.Graphics\DisableHWAcceleration as a DWORD and setting it to 1. 

Note that this will disable hardware acceleration for all WPF applications, including VS 2010, but VMWare's hardware acceleration emulation will still be available to other applications.  If you’re interested in more details, I’d encourage you to take a look at MSDN’s page about this and other graphics rendering registry settings.

Thanks!
-Sean Laberee
VS Platform Team

Answer 1

We are interested in hearing feedback from people who have tried this setting, particularly if this caused a positive change in performance. Please see this post for more details.

Thanks for your time,

Adrian Collier
Program Manager - Visual Studio Shell Team

Answer 2

I've had success using this workaround on Windows 7 running under VMware Fusion 3.  Interestingly, I've got a Windows XP guest running under VMware Fusion 3 without this workaround because it does not suffer from the same blurry text or poor performance (VMware 3D acceleration is disabled for this guest, which probably explains the difference).

Answer 3

I have applied this change (avalon.graphics did not exist, so I created all the entries) but I HAVE NOT seeing any difference in performance.
The only difference I have seen is that I no longer get the "skewed" imagery while they are being loaded - but that is about it. VS2010 is still very unresponsive.

FYI - I have allocated 4gb memory on this guest, and it's running a 64 bit windows 7 with nothing else on it. This is running on VMWare Workstation 6.5.

For good measure I also disabled the 3D accelerator on this guest, but the sluggishness persists.