windows phone emulator not supported due to graphics processing unit configuration (windows 7 on mac)

I'm getting an error when I start up the windows phone emulator:

windows phone emulator not supported because your computer does not have the required graphics processing unit configuration. An XNA framework page will not function without a graphics proc开发者_开发知识库essing unit. Do you want to continue starting the emulator?

And when I attempt to access a web page (any web page) - I just get a blank screen. How do I resolve this?

I'm running windows 7 on a mac.

Check out the system requirements for the emulator on MSDN.

Start by updating your graphics drivers to the latest available. If that doesn't work the next step would be to upgrade the graphics card, if you can.

A PC which won't run the emulator can probably still be used to develop and debug on a real device.

It may be you're also trying to run the latest SDK 7.1 which is far more restrictive than 7.0. If you find yourself unable to run 7.1, dropping down to 7.0 may work on your particular machine.

If you are running Windows 7 on a Virtual Machine on Mac OS X it won't work because there are some restrictions on running a Virtual Machine inside a Virtual Machine.

The quick and easy solution for this is installing Windows 7 in bootcamp, it worked for me.