Sections

• Hardware
  • Emulated Display Card
  • VGA Device RAM
• Auto Resolution
• Scaling
  • Upscaling/Downscaling
  • Retina Mode

See this page for more details on setting up multiple displays.

Hardware

Emulated Display Card

This is the hardware that the guest operating system sees as the display output device.

The devices labeled “(GPU Supported)” support VirGL hardware accelerated rendering. You will also see an informational toggle that is enabled when the display card supports accelerated rendering. Currently, the drivers to support this feature are Linux only. VirGL is an experimental feature and not all applications are supported. Some 3D games and applications may crash or freeze up the VM.

VGA Device RAM

Certain VGA devices support the option to increase the VGA RAM in order to support larger framebuffer sizes. This is NOT VRAM and does not affect rendering performance. Most users do not need to change this. This option is only applicable to VGA display cards and will not be shown otherwise.

Auto Resolution

This enables automatic resolution changing when the window size changes. Guest support is required. See this page for more details.

Scaling

Upscaling/Downscaling

The scaling algorithm to use when up/downscaling. Linear scaling is good for graphical content and has anti-aliasing. Nearest neighbor is good for text and pixel art.

Retina Mode

When this is disabled, the display will be presented at the current resolution and scale that the operating system uses. This is the same resolution that all application render in and adheres to the system wide scaling settings. Typically this means the content rendered by the guest operating system is then scaled up by the host operating system before displaying it.

When this is enabled, UTM will tell the operating system to not scale the view and so if you are on a Hi-DPI display (sometimes called “Retina” display), the resolution reported by the guest operating system appears smaller to the host operating system. If the guest operating system supports Hi-DPI scaling, then this will result in sharper images at the cost of more memory usage and processing.

It is recommended that this is disabled because the host operating system can use efficient hardware scalers while the guest operating system uses software scaling which is more expensive.