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Parallels 3.0 Announced, 3D Graphics Included

Posted by Zonk on from the did-you-know-you-can-play-games-on-your-computer dept.

99BottlesOfBeerInMyF writes "For some time Mac users have been waiting to see who would bring 3D graphics to a Windows emulation/virtualization solution under OS X. It looks like Parallels is going to be the winner. They have announced an RC of Parallels 3.0, with the final to be available 'in a few weeks.' For anyone else tired of Bootcamp or rebooting to play a Windows game, it look like the solution is finally here; I'm not counting out VMWare entirely. Obviously it will depend on how soon they can catch up, but there is some serious first-mover advantage here for Parallels."

9 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. History repeating itself by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Reading about all this virtualisation and emulation stuff reminds me of the shapeshifter days on the amiga.
    Emulating a mac went from a slow and laborious process to something almost realtime.

    The price of this seems a bit harsh though, it pretty much doubles the retail cost of Windows, are Mac users that desperate for this functionality that its worth it?

    --
    liqbase :: faster than paper
  2. uh boot camp still wins by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    why in the world would anyone run emulation when they can run Windows natively with bootcamp. If you're going to play games you would obviously want the most speed you can get. I bought a mac, but I'm 98% in the windows. I only use mac to test web based apps in safari. For people like me or for gamers, I don't see why you would ever use paralells emulation. The speed cost is just too high.

    1. Re:uh boot camp still wins by wal9001 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm not sure why this is modded down, because it's certainly true. You may not be able to run state of the art games too well, but if all you're trying to do is run a FPS from a few years ago and can do so under Parallels then I see no reason not to.

    2. Re:uh boot camp still wins by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I should have made my post more clear. I think Dvorkin is the only one who got it. What I meant to say is that for people who are primarily in Windows for development work or whatever (eg myself), or who are real gamers (3D intensive), the speed cost is just too high to not use bootcamp. If you are usually on a Mac (half my user base is which is why I have these fwunky cool triple bootin' mac beast), then I could see why you would want to use Parallels unless you're doing intense 3D games (in which case I'd highly recommend you boot into windows). But for people in my situation (and there are a lot of us), boot camp makes the most sense. Apple's incredible sales since last year aren't because people are running the Mac OS. I'd venture a guess that a large percentage of people who bought macs over the last year did to use windows but have the option to run Mac OS. For companies like where I work, their cost savings skyrocketed. Hundreds of us had separate Mac and PC's because our user base was mixed. Now we buy one machine at a great price and can triple boot even. veerrry niicee

  3. What about DX performance? by Wicko · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I see Quake 4 supposedly running at full steam (no specs or framerates though, but I'll give the guy the benefit of the doubt), but how are DX games running on that? Since Q4 is using an OGL engine, I can see why it would be able to perform so well. But it is my understanding that DX games greatly outnumber OGL ones.

    Great work otherwise.

  4. Re:hmm by Lally+Singh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Connectix used to do this (in v3 or so) for the mac. Emulating an x86 CPU on PPC. Basically, they just provided a pass-through OpenGL driver that hit the native driver & hardware.

    For native CPU & a pass-through OpenGL stack, it should be pretty close to native speed. Only concerns are:
    1. Direct3D/DirectX (what's it called these days?) -- emulating that or converting it to the native graphics driver isn't trivial. Or even a direct mapping.
    2. Feature differences between implementations of drivers between the mac & windows. My guess is that most of the big boys use common code in between (especially now) with build setups & wrappers for each platform. But, who knows.

    --
    Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
  5. Re:Parallels? *YAWN* by Paradise+Pete · · Score: 3, Interesting
    So what makes Windows suddenly relevant to us now?

    It enabled me to finally convince my boss to dump his Windows box, for one thing. Without Parallels that would never have happened, because he thought he needed it. In reality there was not a single thing he does that required Windows, but this gave him the security blanket. And now he no longer switches to Windows at all.

  6. Re:Parallels: The Mac's Fifth Column by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I have a few interesting quotes for you:
    "And we had really bet our future on the Macintosh being successful, and then, hopefully, graphics interfaces in general being successful, but first and foremost, the thing that would popularize that being the Macintosh." -- Bill Gates about the original Macintosh

    "Well, Apple did the Mac itself, but we got Bill and his team involved to write these applications. We were doing a few apps ourselves. We did MacPaint, MacDraw and stuff like that, but Bill and his team did some great work." -- Steve Jobs about the applications for the original Macintosh

    "And it was also important that, you know, Microsoft was the biggest software developer outside of Apple developing for the Mac." -- Steve Jobs about his return to Apple in 1997

    "We continued to do Macintosh software. Excel, which Steve and I introduced together in New York City, that was kind of a fun event, that went on and did very well." -- Bill Gates about Excel on the Macintosh... which was one of the Mac's very first applications

    Source: Gates and Jobs at D5

  7. Re:hmm by Courageous · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Virtualization presents no overhead when chips with that technology built in and enabled.

    Don't know where you get that idea.

    VMWare, which is practically synonymous with "virtualization" basically doesn't benefit much at all from having VT enabled in the BIOS. Most of the overhead is associated with I/O, can be as much as 50% of the bandwidth and 65% of the latency, and for which turning on VT will help not at all. Don't believe me? Just run a database benchmark, like the Postgrest OSDB test. Or just try ftp'ing large files to/from a virtual machine.

    As for compute, the overhead is 5% at most, WITHOUT VT AT ALL.

    VT has practically no affect on virtualization performance.

    The main benefit of VT is that if you enable it in the BIOS, then Xen and technologies like it can virtualize non-paravirtualized operating systems.

    C//