I have a Dell XPS with an NVIDIA GT540 card and it's with Optimus. The main OS is Windows 7.
I have installed Windows 8 inside VMware Workstation 8, and it works very slowly. Inside NVIDIA Control Panel it tells me that no application is using the GPU. Why?
Why is the VM using the Intel GPU when I have an NVIDIA at my disposal?
UPDATE: well, I installed vmware tools and the performance has improved. But still I sense nVidia is not getting used. 🙁
UPDATE: And now that I see in the notification area, vmx.exe is indeed using my gpu. 🙂 yipeee!!
Best Answer
A virtual machine does not get direct access to your hardware. The hypervisor emulates hardware, what hardware that is emulated depends on which hypervisor you are using.
The Vmware Compatibility Guide includes details about exactly what Guest Operating systems are supported. Windows 8 is not on the list.
For supported guest operating systems VMware does provide a set of drivers for officially support Operating systems that greatly improve the performance of this emulation. With Windows 7 the graphics performance is good enough for Aero to work. Windows 8 is not supported, and I would bet is not likely to be supported for a while.