Games under parallels?

Hey all I am getting a new MBP with 4 gigs of ram and I am haveing a tough time deciding weather I should dual boot under bootcamp or get parallels.

Here are my concerns:

1. If I run windows vista under parallels will it be too slow? What is the speed difference between that and running it under bootcamp considering I will have 4 gigs of ram.

2. If I run Vista with parallels and want to game will the game be slower than under bootcamp? WIll the 4gigs of ram help in this area?

3. If I run vista under prallels will it be as if I am running vista on a windows machine? (similar to running it under bootcamp). Or will it be more like an emulation with compatibility issues?

Bottom line is I am wondering if I should go the parallels route or the bootcamp route. As you can see I like to game and I know gaming under windows is better than under OSX but I still want the full functionality of vista and OSX. What should I do?!

 

You will have to use Bootcamp. Parallels and VMWare support only a very few number of games.

But I assume since you are contemplating running a game under a VM, you are talking about old games, which some may run.

 

Boot camp is recommended for gaming on Windows, parallels will probably suffice, but under boot camp you will get much better performance.

Also, there are many threads with information on this, you may want to try searching for this topic.

 

games require boot camp. while parallels (recommend vmware instead) run windows in a virtual machine, there is still a performance penalty and limited 3d graphics support.

 

The problem that I see is that VMware (And probably parallels too) does not see your video card as anything good. It'll think it's some cheap average SVGA card, and drivers won't install on top of it to correct it.

So when your game tries to load, it sees a "Straight out of 1997" video card, and tells you to get lost.

 

Oh... FIY, both VMWare and Parallels (I recommend VMWare instead of Parallels) allow you to use your bootcamp partition in their tool.

It's pretty slick, unless you use Parallels, and you never really know if you're going to be able to boot back into your bootcamp partition properly...

 

Now, what I'd be interested in seeing, is Virtual Mac OS X in VMware fusion.

For those that like to screw up their OS often enough (developers)... That it'd be more convenient to just screw it up in a virtual environment that you can reload without a second thought.

 

Ok that settles it...I will go with bootcamp. How does it work? when you reboot your system does it give you an option for which OS to boot into?

 

yeah, you hold down the option key to bring up the partition choice thing when you start up. or you can set it to always ask you.