Hello. I have a 24" iMac with the 8800gs video card. I'm running Vista 64-bit using bootcamp. I've found a way to install a driver and get it working for the video card. This might work for your VMware installation as well. Good luck!!
1. Download the latest Nvidia GeForce Driver for Windows Vista 64-bit.
2. Run the exe file. It will fail, but the purpose of this is to create the C:/Nvidia...etc folder that contains the driver.
3. Now open your device manager. If you're a little rusty, that's Start, Right click on computer, properties, device manager (on left)
4. Navigate to the 8800gs graphics adapter under display adapters (it may not be called 8800gs yet)
5. Right Click and update driver.
6. Select Browse my computer for driver software.
7. Select Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer.
8. Select Have Disk and then browse to the location that was made in step 2. This is usually something like c:/nvidia/drivers/.....vista64bit.
9. Then scroll down and select the 8800gs driver and install it (this may take 2 or 3 minutes)
10. Restart and you're finished!
I now have a 5.8 rating in the Vista performance tool. Sweet!
Virtual Machines are different from BOOTCAMP.
Flat out, no if ands or butts about it.
VMWare, Parallels, VirtualPC are virtual machines, meaning they will NOT take full advantage of the actual hardware and in most cases do not have direct access to all the hardware... especially video cards. The video is emulated using the proprietary SVGA drivers provided by the emulation software manufacturer.
BOOTCAMP is native, meaning it is as if you went to googlegear, bought the hardware, put it together and are installing an OS for the first time. It is NATIVE and has direct access to all hardware residing inside/on the logic board. In regards to video it has the same access to the video hardware that OS X does, that Windows running on a DELL does, that a hackintosh has.
You cannot (at least at this time and probably never) install the actual drivers for your video card in a virtual machine. This holds true regardless of the host or guest operating system. (the same is true running vmware for windows/linux/os x, regardless of the OS your installing INTO vmware)
