Any way to get better performance (FPS) on i5 10400F cpu with GeForce GT 730 gpu through VMWare Workstation 17?

[DSN9990]

Hi, I'm new here, I'm getting worse performance in VMWare 17 with latest softgpu driver.

I tested 3DMark 2000 (2001 SE didn't work, says DirectX 8 is not installed for some reason), and the performance was worse than in latest VirtualBox, not sure why.

Any help on getting better performance in VMware Workstation 17?

My machine config is here:
Windows 98.vmx.zip

[DSN9990]

Any help, please? I will appreciate that.

[DSN9990]

Ok, I almost got 3DMark 2001 SE working with this patch in order for it to be able to detect DirectX 8, but now it gave me this error:

Is there any way to work around this? Also, is there any way to get it working without this patch?

[DSN9990]

Any help, please? I'm waiting since yesterday.

[JHRobotics]

I hear you, just a little patience please! :-)

I see the VM has 1GB of RAM, have you applied this patch? If this patch is not applied, '98 machines with more than 512 MB of memory do strange things (file system corruption included).

Also, please write which “GL renderer” wgltest/glchecker reports to you (both are on the CD in the tools folder):

Also, in 3DMark 2001 currently some tests do not work on VMware (and VirtualBox with vGPU9), I found a bug, but the new release version is currently being tested and if it goes well, I could release a new version in a few hours.

[JHRobotics]

Yep, this looks like this is "the problem", because log looks fine. Please don't replace opengl32.dll in SYSTEM folder, some old drivers and wrappers did this, but this creates huge problems with system overal stability. If you don't have original opengl32.dll, copy to SYSTEM folder opengl32.dll file from SoftGPU CD -> redist/opengl95/DLL - this is older version of MS OpenGL for NT 4.0 and Windows 95, but should works with Windows 98 too.

[DSN9990]

Thanks, I got it working now. But my main question here is, how I can get better performance on games such as Quake III, NFS Porsche Unleashed, etc., on 640x480 16 bit mode? I tried these games right now, and the FPS was lower than I expected. I wonder if there are some registry keys to optimize performance or not? And when will be a new release of softgpu?

[DSN9990]

And how can I enable dithering for 16 bit color on any Direct3D/OpenGL game? Is that possible or not? If it is possible to do so, they will have a more faithful visual under 16 bit color games, of course.

[JHRobotics]

Not much, optimalisation for VMware is this:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Mesa3D\global]
; VirtualBox doesn't refresh FB with DMA commands, VMware does
"SVGA_DMA_NEED_REREAD"="0"
; VMware cannot blit directly to screen
"SVGA_BLIT_SURF_TO_SCREEN"="0"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\VMWSVGA]
; cap RGB565 is real, no need to imaginate some
"RGB565bug"=dword:00000000

But it only a bit accelerate 16bit rendering. I'm afraid that I cannot do more here, if you need more performance try VirtualBox - GeForce GT 730 support DX12 and Quake 3 is in 1024x768 on vGPU10 playable.

Currently there is no 16bit dithering, I was thinking of adding something like this, but current rendering is really slow and with this, it’ll be even slower. Also SVGA3D doesn’t have 16-bit rendering support – all operations are done in 32 bit and final render is convert to 16-bit image by CPU – this is reason why most games are in 32bpp faster than in 16bpp although on real HW it is vice versa.

vmware-optimize.zip

[JHRobotics]

New release will be soon (I hope) - today I gradually fount 3 critical bugs in release build, so I’m little tired from it.

[DSN9990]

Not much, optimalisation for VMware is this:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Mesa3D\global]
; VirtualBox doesn't refresh FB with DMA commands, VMware does
"SVGA_DMA_NEED_REREAD"="0"
; VMware cannot blit directly to screen
"SVGA_BLIT_SURF_TO_SCREEN"="0"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\VMWSVGA]
; cap RGB565 is real, no need to imaginate some
"RGB565bug"=dword:00000000

But it only a bit accelerate 16bit rendering. I'm afraid that I cannot do more here, if you need more performance try VirtualBox - GeForce GT 730 support DX12 and Quake 3 is in 1024x768 on vGPU10 playable.

Currently there is no 16bit dithering, I was thinking of adding something like this, but current rendering is really slow and with this, it’ll be even slower. Also SVGA3D doesn’t have 16-bit rendering support – all operations are done in 32 bit and final render is convert to 16-bit image by CPU – this is reason why most games are in 32bpp faster than in 16bpp although on real HW it is vice versa.

vmware-optimize.zip

Thanks for this information. I will soon upgrade my host to a better GPU with DX12 support, but will this help in any way to get smoother framerate? Do you plan in the future to
further optimize the performance in VMware too?

[DSN9990]

Also why there is no 640x480x32 mode to select in NFS Porsche Unleashed? It only shows 800x600 as the lowest screen mode with 32bit color:

Is there any way to work around this? Maybe through the registry? I do not want to use 800x600x32 because it is slower than 640x480x32, however.

[DSN9990]

I was thinking if it is possible to migrate the VMWare VM to VirtualBox to see if there are any performance improvements so far. And which VirtualBox version do you recommend? I tried with the latest version and I got a lot of BSODs/Guru Meditations however.

[DSN9990]

OK, I tried migrating to VirtualBox right now and it doesn't seem to boot, I removed a couple of installed hardware through the System control panel, however this did not help. Here is the log and a screenshot:
VBox.log

As you can see, it just gets stuck with a blinking cursor.
Can you help me with this, please? Sorry again for being impatient.
Edit: Here's the config file:
Windows 98 SE.zip

[DSN9990]

Hi, is there any way to migrate the .vmdk file to VirtualBox like I said above?

[DSN9990]

I will close this now due to unrelated answers.