I found this handy tip on the VMWare Community Forum when suffering from a jerky mouse and screen draw:
The VMWare tools is not installing the correct driver for video processing. In this case you will need to update the driver manually as well as increase the amount of video ram assigned to the VM.
- First off you’ll need your VM to be running the latest VMware Tools and be on VM Hardware version 7.
- Start by shutting the VM down. Edit the settings of the VM and ensure its Video RAM setting is set between 8MB and 32MB of memory.
- After applying the Video RAM setting, start the VM up again, login to Windows and open up the Device Manager.
- Expand the “Display Adapters” tree item and right-click your existing Video driver (this should be called “VMware SVGA II”) – select “Update Driver Software”.
- Browse for the driver and navigate to the ‘C:\Program Files\Common Files\VMware\drivers\wddm_video’ folder. Complete the wizard and you should end up with a driver labeled as “VMware SVGA 3D (Microsoft Corporation – WDDM)” being installed.
- Restart your VM when prompted.
- Once you are back in Windows check your Device Manager to ensure you now have the correct driver installed. It should now look like this:
- Another point worth noting is that VMware state a minimum of 8MB of Video RAM is required when using this driver, however they recommend 32MB for best performance.
According to VMware KB article 1016770 the WDDM driver is installed by default with Windows 7. However with Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2 and Vista, it is not installed by default but still supported.