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I have installed Autodesk's Fusion360 on a Windows virtual machine running onto an Ubuntu host. It all works fine except for rendering: all textures are rendered in a random colorful way.

For instance, on a classical windows machine this piece is rendered nicely with a grey aluminium texture, but on the virtual machine I get this: enter image description here

I guess this is related to the way graphics are handled by the virtual machine. I followed the instructions of this thread, and installed the guest additions + direct3D support on the virtual machine, but I could not get the rendering to work properly.

I have not tried PCIe passthrough yet, but it seems a bit overkill and as there is no guarantee that it solves my problem I would like to find an easier solution.

Did anyone faced this kind of problem before ? Does anyone have an idea of what I could try to solve it ?

Hardware

  • Asus X99E-WS motherboard with 64Gb of RAM
  • ZOTAC GeForce GTX TITAN X graphics card (NVidia driver 352.63)

Host machine

  • Ubuntu 14.04
  • Virtualbox 5.0.10 (r104061)

Virtual machine

  • Windows 10 with 8Gb allocated RAM
  • Guest additions installed
  • Direct3D support enabled
  • 2D and 3D acceleration enabled
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Ratbert
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    Dude this looks awesome! Way better than whatever it's supposed to be ;-) – Dima Tisnek Jan 14 '16 at 09:03
  • Note that enabling 3D acceleration is not enough, you also have to install directx/direct3d driver from Virtualbox into guest. And that only works for d3d, not opengl (I think). You could try `gallium` for of you need opengl, YMMV. – Dima Tisnek Jan 14 '16 at 09:04
  • @qarma. thanks for your comments. As I wrote in the question, guest additions, including direct3d, have already been installed. I can take a look at `gallium`, but what makes you think that it's an opengl-related problem ? – Ratbert Jan 14 '16 at 11:36
  • if d3d driver doesn't support specific texture format (**likely**) or textures at all, or virtual gfx adapter doesn' t have enough video memory to store all the textures, or d3d driver doesn't support shaders (**likely**), you may get better results with OpenGL. – Dima Tisnek Jan 14 '16 at 13:07
  • https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#guestadd-3d it's also possible that 3d acceleration simply doesn't support high-enought directx/direct3d – Dima Tisnek Jan 14 '16 at 13:08
  • If you are truly hardcore, vm can be granted access to a PCI device, and therefore to a physical gfx card. It's easier in Xen than Virtualbox, and only some cards work. Please research feasibility :) – Dima Tisnek Jan 14 '16 at 13:11

1 Answers1

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According to this website here, which includes the minimum specification of the application you wish to use in your Virtual Machine.

Graphics Card: 512MB GDDR RAM or more, except Intel GMA X3100 cards

As I know, (please provide your VM's Graphic Card RAM) VirtualBox supports up to 128Mb RAM (maximum) in most cases, and in some cases you can increase it to 256Mb (I didn't tried myself though).

With my limited knowledge on this topic, I don't think there is a way to get higher than that. But if you find a way to increase the VRAM to 512Mb, I think this will solve your problem.

I think you should try a different virtual machine, without being sure, but according to this website, VMware Horizon 6 (unfortunately not free, but is available for your Linux machine) does support 3D Rendering and Graphics RAM up to 512Mb!

For virtual hardware version 9 (vSphere 5.1) and 10 (vSphere 5.5 Update 1) virtual machines, the default VRAM size is 96MB, and you can configure a maximum size of 512MB.

Rafael
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