Go to the settings of the machine and under Display check the box to accelerate 3D graphics.įrom the list at the bottom of this page pick a combination of VMware version and display driver version. Your virtual machine will need to be off to change this setting. To make matters more complicated, when virtualizing, the version of the hypervisor may also influence if desktop compositing works at all. This is why it’s very important to have the right driver installed. These are the two things we want to have working.Įven when the hardware supports the above points, the driver may limit these features. There are a couple of things we need to make sure are supported and working before desktop compositing will work. Personal experience shows that the following graphic cards work very well with Longhorn and do allow desktop compositing.įor both Nvidia cards driver I recommend driver version 61.77. You may need to install the driver package in Windows XP compatibility mode (right click > properties > compatibility). Moreover, there should be Windows XP drivers available for it. Your computer should at least have a graphics card with Pixel shader 2.0 and DirectX 9 support. For some builds desktop compositing may even work out of the box. In the case you have some old Longhorn-era hardware, it is worth the effort to try and get desktop compositing working. Feel free to share any combinations not listed on this page in the comments section! If you came here looking for drivers, they can be found at the very bottom of this page. Note that it’s very well possible that other combination work out for you. For each of these build I will list the combination of VMware version and display driver that worked for me. At the bottom of this page you’ll find a list of builds that have working desktop compositing. As such, all drivers provided on this page are meant for use with VMware.

I’d like to note that I am writing this tutorial with VMware workstation in mind. In this tutorial you will find everything you need to enable desktop compositing on the Longhorn builds that support it.

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