VS2010's WPF renders poorly inside a Windows7 VM?

Question

Kevin Hoffman this morning reports that:

When put under a virtual machine running Windows 7, VS2010 fails to render things, borders disappear, windows become unusable and the experience is downright awful. On the other hand, when you run VS2010 "bare metal" with no virtualization between it and your video card, everything is beautiful and all works well.

What about a virtual machine would cause VS2010's WPF to render poorly?

Answer 1

WPF renders stuff on a Direct3D surface. It's able to take advantage of hardware acceleration features provided by graphics cards to improve performance. Under VMs, these features might be unavailable.

Answer 2

I haven't tried VS2010 specifically yet, but you may be hitting a known issue with WPF apps in VMs. Try disabling hardware acceleration as described here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa970912.aspx

Our custom WPF app running on a VM had similar performance problems, and that fixed it for us.

Answer 3

VS2010 isn't a finished product and it ties in quite heavily with various elements of the system's native GUI interfaces (which, in Windows 7, also not a finished product, these are not fully cultivated). It's not entirely surprising that two betas running in a virtualised environment would have issues. As stated, this is liable to be an Aero issue, which ties in heavily with DirectX's hardware rendering. These issues might not occur under classic assuming Win7 has that.

Answer 4

As Mehrdad says, Virtual Machines don't really virtualize 3D hardware (there is some work being done in this area by VMWare, but it's only older versions of DirectX I think) and WPF utilizes the GPU to render more efficiently, thus it has to use software to render in a virtual machine and that is significantly slower.

If you have a multi-core machine, and you're using a Virtual Machine manager that supports giving VM's multiple cores, then you might consider adding more cores to the VM to better utilize CPU resources, or use Kevin's Registry changes.

Answer 5

I'm using Windows 7 + VS 2010 + WPF and everything is fine, however I'm using VMWare Fusion with hardware acceleration on.