Autodesk Fusion 360

Fusion 360 in VMware-player virtual machine

Why? It is merely not possible to run Autodesk Fusion 360 in a VirtualBox environment even with §D turned on. Why? VirtualBox allows only 256 MB Ram of memory to pass to its virtual machines. This leads to massive artifacts, that make the work with Fusion 360 almost not possible. VMware(-player) instead allows you to add enough for this task.

I tested this with a Intel XEON system (integrated intel graphic). I added a simple NVIDIA GT 610 (2GB RAM, passive cooled, costs around 40 €).

Prerequisites:

• Be sure to have a NVIDIA graphics card with opengl support
• Install VMware-player
• Be sure to give the installed virtual machine (Windows) enough RAM from the graphics card (recommended 1GB)
• start vmware-player with

export DRI_PRIME=1; /usr/bin/vmplayer /path/to/virtualmachine_name.vmx

Or if you installed VIX (vmrun):

export DRI_PRIME=1; vmrun -T player start  /path/to/virtualmachine_name.vmx

Note: DRI_PRIME only works with the free graphics driver NOUVEAU and INTEL, not with the proprietary ones !!! The proprietary driver is not able to run a program on the Nvidia card while the intel graphic driver is used (former known as "optimusrun"). If you like to use the proprietary Nvidia driver, then you have to use prime-select (Optimus graphic card) and switch completely to the nvidia card.

• 

  dxdiag in VirtualBox (shows 256MB RAM and DirectX 9)

• 

  dxdiag in VMware-player started with DRI_RIME=1 on dedicated NVIDIAD card (shows 1GB RAM and DirectX 10)

GPU path through is NOT possible with this setup. Only VMware-ESXI or -Workstation - which are not free - have this feature. Another Option would be KVM an use GPU paththrough (not tested). But since I am using Virtualbox for other virtualmachines this is a problem: KVM/quemu and virtualbox can not run side by side. But VMware and VirtualBox can!