Disable 'graphics hardware enhancements' in Photoshop CS6?

I was able to bypass the issue by creating a new user profile, running Photoshop and allowing it to disable the settings in question, and then using the contents of "C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS6\Adobe Photoshop CS6 Settings" in a template profile so all users will have the setting disabled on first logon.

Are you using a VM to run Windows on a Mac, or on a Windows system?  I ask, because the latter might provide better GPU support (I'm not sure).

I'm running Windows VMs on Windows 7 and I don't see the alert. I find I can use GPU acceleration in a VMware virtual machine, though the virtual VRAM isn't large enough to use 3D functionality.  I don't do a lot of production work in this mode, though, just testing.  But things like the animated zoom and other GPU functions seem to work just fine.

Make sure you have the latest VMware software.

Here's what I see in Photoshop Help - System Info when run in a VM with Photoshop CS6:

Adobe Photoshop Version: 13.0 (13.0 20120315.r.428 2012/03/15:21:00:00) x64

Operating System: Windows NT

Version: 6.2

System architecture: Intel CPU Family:6, Model:12, Stepping:2 with MMX, SSE Integer, SSE FP, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2

Physical processor count: 8

Processor speed: 3458 MHz

Built-in memory: 8191 MB

Free memory: 7014 MB

Memory available to Photoshop: 7206 MB

Memory used by Photoshop: 90 %

Image tile size: 128K

Image cache levels: 4

OpenGL Drawing: Enabled.

OpenGL Drawing Mode: Basic

OpenGL Allow Normal Mode: False.

OpenGL Allow Advanced Mode: False.

OpenGL Allow Old GPUs: Not Detected.

Video Card Vendor: VMware, Inc.

Video Card Renderer: Gallium 0.4 on SVGA3D; build: RELEASE; 

Display: 2

Display Bounds:=  top: 0, left: 1600, bottom: 1200, right: 3200

Display: 1

Display Bounds:=  top: 0, left: 0, bottom: 1200, right: 1600

Video Card Number: 1

Video Card: VMware SVGA 3D

OpenCL Unavailable

Driver Version: 7.14.1.1211

Driver Date: 20121003000000.000000-000

Video Card Driver: vm3dum64.dll,vm3dum,vm3dgl64.dll,vm3dgl

Video Mode: 1600 x 1200 x 4294967296 colors

Video Card Caption: VMware SVGA 3D

Video Card Memory: 128 MB

Video Rect Texture Size: 8192

Serial number: redacted

Application folder: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS6 (64 Bit)\

Temporary file path: C:\TEMP\

Photoshop scratch has async I/O enabled

Scratch volume(s):

  C:\, 159.7G, 118.9G free

Required Plug-ins folder: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS6 (64 Bit)\Required\

Primary Plug-ins folder: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS6 (64 Bit)\Plug-ins\

Additional Plug-ins folder: \\Noelc4\c\DEV\ProDigital\trunk\plugins\Output\Win\LastBuild\x64\

For what it's worth, there are even tricky ways to force it into Advanced mode, and that also seems to work on the VM, enabling such things as accelerated Liquify.

-Noel

The GPU preference is disabled because the display driver returned errors.

You should notify VMWare so they can fix their driver to work correctly and not return errors.