It’ll definitely run Kali well, Windows will be left without hardware acceleration for 2D/3D so it’ll be a little laggy but it’s usable.
VMware has its own driver that converts enough DirectX for Windows to run smoother and not fall back to the basic VGA path.
But VMware being proprietary software, changing distro won’t make it better so it’s either you deal with the VMware bugs or you deal with stable but slow software rendering Windows.
That said on the QEMU side, it’s possible to attach one of your host’s GPUs to the VM, where it will get full 3D acceleration. Many people are straight up gaming in competitive online games, in a VM with QEMU. If you have more than one GPU, even if it’s an integrated GPU + a dedicated one like is common with most Intel consumer non-F CPUs, you can make that happen and it’s really nice. Well worth buying a used GTX 1050 or RX 540 if your workflow depends on a Windows VM running smoothly. Be sure your CPU and motherboard support it properly before investing though, it can be finicky, but so awesome when it works.
On Vista and up, there’s only the Display Only Driver (DOD) driver which gets resolutions and auto resizing to work, but it’s got no graphical acceleration in itself.
It’ll definitely run Kali well, Windows will be left without hardware acceleration for 2D/3D so it’ll be a little laggy but it’s usable.
VMware has its own driver that converts enough DirectX for Windows to run smoother and not fall back to the basic VGA path.
But VMware being proprietary software, changing distro won’t make it better so it’s either you deal with the VMware bugs or you deal with stable but slow software rendering Windows.
That said on the QEMU side, it’s possible to attach one of your host’s GPUs to the VM, where it will get full 3D acceleration. Many people are straight up gaming in competitive online games, in a VM with QEMU. If you have more than one GPU, even if it’s an integrated GPU + a dedicated one like is common with most Intel consumer non-F CPUs, you can make that happen and it’s really nice. Well worth buying a used GTX 1050 or RX 540 if your workflow depends on a Windows VM running smoothly. Be sure your CPU and motherboard support it properly before investing though, it can be finicky, but so awesome when it works.
Thanks for the tip!
You can install the virtual drivers in windows to get better graphics acceleration.
They mostly don’t exist yet apart from this PR.
On Vista and up, there’s only the Display Only Driver (DOD) driver which gets resolutions and auto resizing to work, but it’s got no graphical acceleration in itself.