I am using now Solidworks in a virtual machine and it works nice. I fixed a problem that is worth to note here:
Hi,
I was able to make Solidworks use hardware OpenGL on VMWare 11.0. It took me a while and I kept coming across this post so hopefully, this will save someone some time.
To recap, Solidworks must "recognize" a graphics card to enable OpenGL support for it. If it doesn't, the option "Use Software OpenGL" in Solidworks settings is checked and grayed out.
Apparently, they have workarounds that can be enabled to "force" Solidworks to recognize specific adapters as OpenGL capable.
Open regedit.exe and navigate to
HKEY\_CURRENT\_USER\\Software\\SolidWorks\\SOLIDWORKS 2019\\Performance\\Graphics\\Hardware\\VMware, Inc.
There should be a DWORD entry called Workarounds. Mine was set to 0x10. Change it to 0x09 and start Solidworks. The option "Use Software OpenGL" should be unchecked and not grayed out.
I have no idea what do these values mean (chances are it's a bit-mapped value and one bit enables the opengl). feel free to experiment with different values if you'd like.