Ive tried a few different VM-wares, but I cant remember which ones sorry.
And I didnt have any sucess with any on them. Same error as you.

BUT, I was a noob with all these apps, so there may have been a config issue
that I was missing.

In a nutshell, all the VM sessions I created only had "generic" video-card
emulation that did not support ANY shader models, and GS was rejecting it
out of hand...

I didnt have any success solving this issue .. but I didnt try real hard either...


Hope this helps you in some way...