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    Macbook Pro Core i7 & Paralells Desktop Gaming...

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by Mista_Vanquish, Apr 18, 2010.

  1. Mista_Vanquish

    Mista_Vanquish Notebook Guru

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    So, I'm still awaiting the delivery of my new Macbook Pro 15 w/Core i7 and I was wondering how gaming performance is with Paralells Desktop 5? I really don't want to do boot camp, if at all possible, but do want decent gaming performance. I will be using Fusion for all of my work-related VM's but my main Windows 7 VM will be under Paralells Desktop.

    Will I get comparable gaming performance with Paralells or should I stick with boot camp?
     
    Mista_Vanquish, Apr 18, 2010
    #1
  2. Mista_Vanquish

    Mista_Vanquish Notebook Guru

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    *bump*...................................
     
    Mista_Vanquish, Apr 18, 2010
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  3. hkseo100

    hkseo100 Notebook Evangelist

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    I tried gaming with my friend's er... desktop with VMWare Fusion. my friend has the desktop version of the chepeast i7 (idk what it is). CS Source was sluggish/laggy/stuttering in direct x 8 mode lol
     
    hkseo100, Apr 18, 2010
    #3
  4. Mista_Vanquish

    Mista_Vanquish Notebook Guru

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    What is a good boot-camp partition size? My Windows 7 boot-camp will be used primarily for playing an occasional game and for work. I'm thinking 100GB should be sufficient. What do most people do?
     
    Mista_Vanquish, Apr 18, 2010
    #4
  5. doh123

    doh123 Without ME its just AWESO

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    no matter the hardware... gaming on a virtual machine will always be very very poor.

    If you want to run Windows games in OSX, you need to use Wine, or something Wine based... like Crossover Games.

    Wine just replicates the Windows APIs so the games can run, with no copy of Windows even needed, and direct hardware access.

    Historically drivers for Intel graphics have run poorly or not at all on Wine though, so I have no idea how the Intel/nvidia auto switching will affect that.

    I have a project (in my sig) I call Wineskin, thats focuses on making "ports" of Windows games to run on Macs that look and act like a normal Mac app, but since its using Wine, which isn't perfect (yet) it cannot run everything...

    As to Parallels and VMware fusion, I've had better gaming performance out of Fusion than out of Parallels, but I haven't ever used Parallels 5... but either one is pretty pitiful.
     
    doh123, Apr 18, 2010
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  6. maratus

    maratus Notebook Consultant

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    Parallels 5 excels in 3D performance compared to previous versions but it's not even close to what you get with direct hardware access. I was able to play Alien Shooter 2 on low/mid settings. High settings and some visual effects caused shuttering and low fps in general. But you can forget about any modern 3D game in VM environment.

    If you didn't get it I suggest you to read about virtualization.
     
    maratus, Apr 19, 2010
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  7. crazycanuk

    crazycanuk Notebook Virtuoso

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    most of it will also depend on what games you want to play in the first place.
     
    crazycanuk, Apr 19, 2010
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  8. masterchef341

    masterchef341 The guy from The Notebook

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    masterchef341, Apr 19, 2010
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  9. Mista_Vanquish

    Mista_Vanquish Notebook Guru

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    Mista_Vanquish, Apr 20, 2010
    #9