Black screen with 3d acceleration enabled for Gazebo and Rviz (Robotic)

[Jean-MichelL]

Hi,
I just updated my parallels Desktop to 17.1.1 update. Since this update, 3d acceleration seems to work better as I now have a normal background (before the update I had a black background). However I still have to major problems:
-Gazebo displays a black screen when I enable 3d acceleration
-RVIZ displays a black screen when I enable 3d acceleration
Without 3d acceleration, black screen problem vanishes and I manage to have 15 FPS, but with an M1Pro, I am sure I can get a solid 40 FPS and even more.

 

[AlessandroP13]

An update to RodrigoS9’s OGRE 1 workaround, this time for Ubuntu 24.04 ARM64, Gazebo Harmonic and ROS 2 Jazzy on Parallels 27.

Switching to OGRE 1 was the starting point, but it wasn’t enough on my setup. With system Mesa 25.2.8 and VirGL, Gazebo could render the scene while GPU LiDAR returned incorrect ranges and a camera with noise enabled produced black frames.

The working configuration uses a patched OGRE 1 rendering build and private Mesa 24.0.5, loaded only by the Gazebo processes. System Mesa stays unchanged. This gets me around 60 GUI fps, with working GPU LiDAR and RGB camera output, without LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE or OGRE_RTT_MODE.

The profile applies to normal gz sim and ros2 launch commands.

For RViz, loading the same private Mesa through wrappers around the packaged rviz2 executables resolved the black viewport: grid and map are visible, with GL_RENDERER reporting virgl.
No RViz source changes were needed.

Tested on a MacBook Pro M5 Max with Parallels 27.0.3 (58680), then checked again after updating to 27.1.0 (58756). Stock OGRE 2 still fails here, so this remains an OGRE 1 workaround.

I’ve documented the setup, scripts, test evidence and rollback steps for both:

• Gazebo installation guide
• RViz fix

Validated on one machine so far.
Hope this saves someone a few evenings of debugging.