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Parallels 3.0 Announced, 3D Graphics Included
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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//