Setting Custom Video Memory Size in Fusion

Products

• VMware Desktop Hypervisor

Issue/Introduction

This article provides information about reducing the size of the video memory (vRAM) allocated by Fusion.

Note: Fusion assigns 128 MB by default and does not support assigning more.

Environment

VMware Fusion Pro 10.x
VMware Fusion 10.x
VMware Fusion 4.x
VMware Fusion 2.x
VMware Fusion Pro 8.x
VMware Fusion 5.x
VMware Fusion 1.x
VMware Fusion 6.x
VMware Fusion 7.x
VMware Fusion 8.x
VMware Fusion 3.x

Resolution

In Fusion 7.x and above, you can increase the video memory through the user interface. To increase the video memory:

1. Shut down the virtual machine.
2. From the Apple menu bar, select Virtual Machine > Settings.
3. Select Display.
4. Change the value of the display memory from the drop down available for Shared graphic memory.

Note: There is no way to choose a different video memory size through the user interface in Fusion 6.x, 5.x and 4.x. It must be done by editing the virtual machine settings (.vmx)file. For more information, see Editing the .vmx file for your Fusion virtual machine (1014782).

Add this line to the .vmxfile:

svga.vramSize = value_in_bytes

 

where value_in_bytesis the desired memory size in bytes

 

Note: To convert MB to bytes, multiply the number of MB by 1048576 (the number of bytes in a MB).

For example, to reduce the video memory to 64 MB, add this line to the .vmx file:

svga.vramSize = 67108864

Note: The vRAM assigned by Fusion does not equal the size of the video RAM available to the guest. The guest's video RAM is limited by the amount of vRAM in the Mac's graphics card and the maximum of the guest operating system. Windows XP has a maximum of 128 MB, whereas Windows Vista and 7 have a maximum of 256 MB.
 

Additional Information

For translated versions of this article, see:

• Español:
• Português:
• 日本語: Fusion のカスタム ビデオ メモリ サイズの設定 (2073871)
• 简体中文: 在 Fusion 中设置自定义视频内存大小 (2086165)