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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."
The second release of VMWare Fusion had D3D8 acceleration under XP and it was released a few months ago. It's not like Parallels is first to this party.
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
reportedly, it is pretty close, but like VMWare limited in games that will be certified to run good on it.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
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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.
Why?
Of all the elements in the system, the graphics interface once shouldn't run slower.
Its just mainly copying data around rather than executable assembly instruction translation/manipulation.
A block of allocated memory can be passed directly to the card without any messing.
Virtualisation is difficult because you are trying to act as middleman between two different operating systems with different ways to do things. However for the graphics, both those operating systems need to already speak the same language to talk with a graphics card, the memory is laid out the same, the commands are the same and the way of talking to it is the same.
liqbase
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.
I currently run Windows under Parallels, but Linux under VMware Fusion due to the lack of Linux guest tools. The Parallels 3.0 announcement said Linux guest tools were provided, and that was a major reason why I've put down the cash for the pre-order.
Cheers,
Ian
While I'm sure the gamer crowd represents a vast share of Parallel's customer base, I am still disappointed that they seem to entirely neglect their technical customers. New releases often, if not always, come without changelogs. There is no quick way to send a machine image to someone else. There are still no Parallels Tools that synchronise mouse movement etc. for operating systems other than Windows.
VMWare people, bring it on, release every zig! This is a market where we need some competition.
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
Think that this is a great idea. Come on guys, show some respect, please. Perhaps there are better options out there for many situations, but if you want to save some hassle while setting up your mac to run 3d wndows applications and are willing to take a small performance hit, then I say 'go for it'. "The people are quite taken with her - A trifle simple perhaps - but the appeal is undeniable."
The new MSV alpha
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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File Deletion is Murder.
Keep in mind they are not reimplementing the methods, they are simply providing a wrapper.
Native operation:
Application -> (call to) -> DirectX/OpenGL library -> (call to) -> Native driver -> (low level call to) -> Graphic card
Parallels:
Application -> DirectX/OpenGL -> Parallels driver -> Parallels host (fixes coordinates) -> Native driver - Graphic card
Thus, in a way, you don't really decrease "bandwith", you decrease "latency" which is very minimal. I would guess no more a few handful instructions.
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
I bought Parallels when I got my MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, even the latest version causes regular kernel panics. The machine is rock solid without the Parallels kernel modules loaded and grey screens a couple of times a week with them. I've seen it on Core 1 machines running fine, but on Core 2 laptops it's definitely still in the 'avoid like the plague' category.
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What version of DirectX?
VMWare Fusion does 8.0,which annoyingly doesn't work with alot of what I want to use it for... Does parallels do one better? All I need is 9 =-)
Umm, the graphics interface will run slower when virtualized in any way. OpenGL - direct to hardware calls. D3D = OS overhead. Virtualization of OpenGL would be much easier and much faster, while having not one but now TWO layers with Parallels put in the mix is going to create some MASSIVE overhead. Graphical performance will drop, as my pal noticed on his MacBook.
Native booting into the OS is the only real way to get it done, unless you're doing something you can easily wait on (like post-process rendering for movies)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I'm not a Troll, it's reverse psychology.
Because Win98 won't run natively on a Mac, and even if I could install it I wouldn't be able to do the system updates since the update server is down. However, I happen to have this virtual machine image that is fully updated. Maybe now I'll be able to play System Shock 2 on my Mac.
This will only be of use to the casual gamer, or for games that don't have a lot of high-speed interaction. As a Parallels user myself, I think I'll still reboot into XP for playing BF2. I need every last ounce of my GPU to run my display at 2048x1536 with all rendering settings set to High.
cat
I'm looking forward to playing Quake 2 with faster software rendering under Parallels. However, OpenGL support would be nice.
I'm afraid you might be confusing emulation with virtualization. In theory virtualization should add little to zero overhead. Virtualizing certain aspects such as memory access or CPU usage will have some overhead but virtualizing GPU usage should be negligible. We'll see how well they did when it is released but I would be it will run most software at near direct boot performance. Remember virtualization is Native, it will still be using the same Native machine calls that would be used with direct booting.
This is a perfect example of why I think the Mac community has been compromised by using Office X, and other products from Microsoft's Mac Business Unit. As I have mentioned here before, I do not trust PC-type people. They do not think like us. They are not like us. They are as close to "alien life forms" as we can get without having to leave this planet.
/Applications folder, none of them pledge allegiance to a corporate master churning out horrifying simulacra of Mac users' innovations. On top of that, given that they are run by Windows users, how easy would it be for one of them to allow a "friend" to dummy up a Trojan, have another "friend" port it to the Mac, and then allow another "friend" to unleash a remote controlled hell on our private Bonjour-configured LANs? After all, they are "blood", right?
Seriously, they do not share our values. They hate that we have good taste. They like to keep their windows maximized and their ligatures uncombined. They think gray is a color. Hell, most of them are perfect little squares in perfectly square holes and if you go to PC strongholds like Staten Island you'll see most of the media they consume is produced by Mac users, as the Windows demographic is incapable of creativity in music, the arts, interior design, etc.
They are backwards. They live in the 1980s. They've contributed nothing meaningful to humanity for decades and decades. While we different thinkers are out writing AppleScripts, making HyperCard stacks, mixing in Logic Pro, editing collaboratively in SubEthaEdit, proofing rainbow banners in Illustrator, creating wealth through a variety of postmodern/postindustrial models and winning Nobels and Pulitzers and Grammys and Tonys and Oscars and Pritzkers along the way, the PC users are sitting on their asses downloading the fruits of our labor (how else do you explain so many being able to reference Futurama, bash the New Yorker, etc.?) The only thing they have in their favor is old, fat, white-bread bankrolls accumulated on slavery and imperialism and, personally, I wish their inherited wealth would run dry. Sure, we'd have a hell of a headache funding our next indie production, but so would the whole world, and when faced with adversity the ingenuity of Mac users truly comes to the fore.
Anyway, back on point. Why don't I trust the Mac Business Unit?
Because to have PC-type people writing software to help us finance our projects, communicate with our studios, write our manifestoes and organize our political protests, is a disaster waiting to happen.
Whereas we may allow products from other dull, dogma-bound companies into our
Which leads me to how some in our own community are encouraging PC-type people to switch to the Mac.
If you go back and do some checking of stories, you will see that in most cases where lifelong Windows users suddenly buy Macs, or people who are Linux to the core suddenly pirate Intel OS X from the internet, it is almost all done in cahoots with another recent switcheur (read: poseur) on the "inside" or one that "knows" someone on the inside.
So if we have these so-called "switchers" from Linux and Windows in the Mac community, facilitating crass, classless ass-pickery on our platform by encouraging more PC-type people to switch, just how far a stretch is it to say the PC users in charge of the MBU won't do the same when it comes to our applications? HMMMMM?!?!?!
You're an idiot.
Virtualization presents no overhead when chips with that technology built in and enabled. Lots of machines do not come with this turned on by default, so naturally they're going to suffer a massive performance hit. We had this problem constantly at the HP repair depot - we'd get commercial line laptops back with complaints of "Virtualization is too slow/does not work on this machine." Quick check in the BIOS - oh, look, it's been disabled. Eventually it happened so often that HP support had to tell them to check their BIOS settings when they called in - saved us lots of wasted time replacing the entire logic board when all it took was a BIOS setting to change. It also made many top-dog IT managers very unhappy that it was something so trivial. I bet lots of people lost their jobs over such a simple oversight.
Most people aren't even aware there's an option for that in the BIOS if the chip supports it. If you run it on a chip that doesn't come with virtualization extensions, you WILL suffer quite a performance hit.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
This is *the* big feature for me. Sure, bootcamp is great, but for those times that I need access to a Vista app - for example, the new Office - being able to quickly access my bootcamp partition without restarting would be superb.
DirectX is a large set of libraries, with Direct3D being the graphics library in the package, with DirectInput being the input module, etc. Some games (id software games come to mind) use DirectX for a number of things, while still using OpenGL for graphics. The only confusion about the name is in your head, really :)
Regarding performance, it seems to me that even if there *is* a performance hit (and there probably will be), the purpose here is not getting the world's best gaming rig. I don't think anyone here is convinced any product in the Apple lineup will ever be that. The purpose is getting enough performance to run games decently without hiccups getting in the way of your fun. And I think it quite likely they'll succeed in that.
As a Mac user who ONLY uses Windows for the few games I enjoy which don't have a Mac equivalent, I have yet to find the rebooting aspect of BootCamp to be slow in the least. Shutting down OSX has always been a quick-fast-and-in-a-hurry process, with the whole machine completely down in about 15 seconds, tops. Windows, it seems, performs better than I have ever seen it on my iMac and boots up completely in just under a minute or so. In fact, rebooting into Windows on my iMac takes FAR less time than it does to start VirtualPC on my iBook. If I am going to play a game for a couple of hours at a stretch, then I fail to see how a simple minute or so to get Windows up and running is too much of a price to pay.
Parallels and Bootcamp don't exist for die hard Macintosh users. As you say, for decades you haven't cared.
You're missing the point of these tools entirely - they exist for people like me: die hard Windows/Linux users that have always been disdainful of the Mac for various reasons (for me it was gaming and learning curve, for others it was legacy application support, for others it was hatred of a one button mouse, etc).
Now there's a way I and the zillions of others who are now jaded with Microsoft can buy a sweet Apple computer that are all the rage now - all the kids are using them and they're all over the TV, so they must be good, right!? - with the confident knowledge that I can still boot to Windows if I need to, or use Parallels to run my games, or whatever.
I've been a die hard PC user since XT days but now the Macintosh is appealing to me specifically because of these features. I'm a lot closer to spending my $$$ on a Macintosh now than ever before, and many of my PC using friends have already made the switch.
You and the rest of the Mac guys don't have to pay any attention to it and can smugly assume superiority, but you might as well wait until everyone like me has already switched over!
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.
Hey, ignore that idiot AC. Even die hard Macintosh users can see the usefulness of Parallels and Bootcamp. I'm all for basing Windows, but to say that all the applications that run on Windows are useless is just trolling or cultish.
Yes. Most gamers. You didn't think hardcore gamers who need "every last ounce of my GPU to run my display at 2048x1536 with all rendering settings set to High" are the majority, did you?
I think I'll go download the demo and see if it can run Pirates now.
I have never quite understood the them and us feelings of some users. Personally I use a computer to get my job done and I don't give a flying flip what "kind" of other people are coming to join the party. To be honest I'm glad of all the users who want to run my chosen platform as it makes it better supported and more likely to improve...
:D
Recently I've "moved" from Mac OS X to Ubuntu, because REALLY like having a system that updates all of my software on its own. I didn't move because Ubuntu is cool, or because Mac OS is crappy, but because it makes my job easier. Tools like Parallels will allow Windows users who want to move to Mac OS for whatever reason do so more easily, and that can only be a good thing for your chosen platform. Embrace the newbies
HOWEVER, having said that I can see your point about "Macintosh Explorer", I think my eyes might actually be bleeding that thing is horrible.
I really like the idea of Parallels, especially with the 3D stuff now working, but I know somebody who had parallels running Windows XP and then Parallels crashed. This caused a hard disk corruption. The MacBook Pro was brand new and since we (Australia) have to send machines to the US for the warranty, it was months before it was back in his hot little hand. The sellers didn't want to touch the thing even though it was just out of the box. Unfortunately, this is why we no longer buy Mac Pros for our visualisation lab. I dearly love the machines but the ship to the US thing for the warranty makes them a terrible investment.
I think I'll steer completely free of Parallels and stick to a bootcamp ->reFit setup.
.
Close. It wasn't OpenGL, it was GLIDE. and version 2. (click here if you want to flash back to heady days of decent II and Dark Forces II)
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/upgra de
:-)
Congratulations! Your upgrade will be free
Also parallels has linux and windows versions of their current products. So it is safe to assume they will have a linux version of this as well. This means cedega faces a new kind of competition. Competition is always a good thing.
In reality your bosses "Windows" box is not really a windows box at all, its just an ordinary PC without the special chip on the motherboard that says 'you can install Mac OS'. To me, the equipment is the same, the capabilities are the same, it's just the software needs that determine the OS necessary. If parallels can produce a virtual Windows install that compares favorably with native Windows, I think that benefits every Mac user out there who uses more than a word processor and web browser, because it opens his system up to running a wide variety of software that is not available without going through the hassle of multibooting. You're not going to draw the hard core PC gamer any more than Linux does anyways.
Dear Sir or Madame, you seem to have made a typo in your guide / F.A.Q. on slashdot... #5 should be NRTFA (Never Read The F$#@ing Article)
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
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//
Also, the idea that virtualization has "no overhead" is expensive marketing hype: the idea that virtualization reduces power consumption is the exact opposite of the truth. My MacBook runs hotter with Parallels running that it does without it.
Power consumption goes up with virtualization generally. Consider this ZD Net article on the hidden costs of virtualization (the silent enemy). Anyone considering virtualizing a server farm needs to include the cost of increased power and A/C consumption in their calculations.
Umm, read VMware's own announcement that in three years they EXPECT to remove all overhead in virtualization? Oh, look. I still happen to have the page bookmarked. Here you go.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I'm a Mac user. Yes, I demand that developers do things differently on the Mac than on any other platform. If they don't, I don't care if they get tired of me, because I don't want their applications.
You don't just install crap all over my Mac. I want a single, simple bundle that I can install using drag-and-drop, and uninstall by dragging it to the Trash. If you absolutely need to install additional stuff, then:
If you don't do that, your application will flop on the Mac. If you create an application for the Mac, make it a Mac application and not just a Windows port.
Yes, exactly, well said! There are people out there who actually aren't gamers and don't pay an interest for it. It might come as a shocking revelation to those that take it for granted that a computer is "obviously" used for gaming firsthandedly and "the occasionally needed" school project.
I myself spend my time playing games on my Playstation 2, and not even as a radical and politically extreme substitute - it's something I only do once a week on weekends because it's fun. The things I use my computer for right now is mainly for doing school assignments, reading news on the web, occasionally I search for jobs online, talk with friends over IM and Skype, write and reply to e-mails (although not frequent).
I'm also in talks with an editor to get published in a Swedish computer magazine for a potential career as a journalist whether it will be ambitious or not, which means I will use my Mac even more to get work done rather than spend my days with games. However, I don't blame people who use their ultrafast (or mediocre for that part) computer to mostly play games with it. I know it's fun and entertaining, but it's not something that every computer user in the whole world use their machine for.
"People are stupid. Persons are smart" -- Agent K, MiB.
Can I echo this?
I will be buying my first mac within a couple of weeks. The major purpose of this mac will be to develop software for the windows platform (IIS, SQL Server etc). I'm really attracted to the mac hardware and OS X but unless I can run some of the windows stuff it just isn't going to happen.
I'm looking forward to the day when I do a demo of the software to a customer, running the entire thing as a Parallels VM from a Mac laptop. I'll find it funny even if nobody else does.
meh
I'm kind of disturbed that they're asking us to pay for the upgrade, since they haven't had a version that's got even beta-quality USB support for more than a few months: I still have to disable and re-enable USB every time I sync my Palm, but at least it's possible now. I feel like I've been paying for being in their beta program, and shouldn't have to pay again for their "real" version.
Even if they're calling it 3.0.
I've been debating switching to VMWare already, because they've had good USB support from the start, AND they've been calling a beta version "beta". What's been holding me back is that I've already sunk the cost of Parallels, and don't want to pay again for VMWare when it comes out of beta. But if I'm going to have to pay again anyway, I might as well jump ship and go with a professional company.
What they plan to do in three years, with technology not yet fielded, and what is true today are different things.
You were talking in the present, about current BIOS settings. Chances are, your clients experiencing problems with virtualization performance didn't have enough memory. The VT settings are hardly relevant to VMWare deployments today. Virtually all performance problems with virtualization can be traced to insufficient memory or insufficient storage fabric speed.
C//
My clients, with their virtualization machines, had the maximum amount of RAM in their laptops - 2 to 4 gigs, depending upon the model. It most certainly was not a lack of memory. 4 gigs of PC2-4200/5300 is pretty beastly. Hell, I only have one gig and running two VMs of BeOs and Windows under Linux works fine when I have the virtualization on my processsor enabled in BIOS, without those extensions enabled the performance drops about 20% - still usable considering the small tasks that I do (very minor gaming, web browsing, music playing, etc.) but when it comes to intensive testing across multiple OSes at once to determine compatibility across each OS you wish to test, those extensions come in handy. There's a reason Intel is putting hardware-assist virtualization instructions in their processors.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Certainly Parallels is ahead in the feature set. But how does memory usage compare? Parallels 2.0 seems to commmit all the memory you allocated in preferences, whereas VMWare uses only as much memory as its vms need. This can have some pretty important performance implications. In fact it is the number one reason why I use vmware fusion. Features like coherence and the integration things in Parallels 3.0 are killer, though. I've wanted coherence-style vm operation for many years.
I'm quite curious what virtualization platform you are using, where enabling VT/SVM in BIOS makes such a difference. It's certainly not VMware, because current hardware virtualization runs slower than the state-of-the-art in software. AMD and Intel have new chips with second-generation hardware virtualization (which DO make that much of a difference), but you can't buy those yet. I do suggest reading the paper linked above - it's a great description of where all the virtualization overheads actually are.
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
If you have 2 gigs of ram in a machine, but then install a second OS, if that OS plus the primary OS each have memory utilization profiles greater than one gig, the machine will start to swap. Performance will drop catastrophically. "20% performance boost" for VMWare is inconsistent with both what VMWare has said publicly and what my lab findings verify. For one, with or without VT enabled, VMWare is 95% efficient for CPU. VT doesn't improve I/O at all. Which virtualization technology are you using? Which benchmarks have you run?
My findings are for VMWare ESX (which of course, will not readily so much as install on a laptop), using Dell 1955 blades (Intel Woodcrest 5160 CPUs... which offer VT). I've validated with the OSDB benchmark, SPEC int/fp, and a variety TCP/IP benchmarks as well as an NFS benchmark. My conclusions to date have been firmly this: CPU efficiency doesn't matter (VMWare already 95% efficient), and I/O can use a lot of help (50% inefficient for network bandwidth, 65% latency hit). Xen does better on this last, but that's a different matter.
The other issue is, of course, storage. If one is using the host OS and guest OS at the same time, disk performance will be effectively 50% for each, being that there is only one drive to subdivide. That can hurt ya where it counts.
C//
Anybody been flying on a Wright-brand airplane recently? Anybody using an Altair-brand personal computer? (yes, yes, techno-archaeologists, you don't count) How many people run Multics or CP/M? Got a Fairchild Semiconductor chip or a Texas Instruments transistor in your computer? Microsoft was not first with the GUI, Apple was not first with the mp3 player, nor Google with the search engine. All first-mover advantage means is that for a little while you have the market to yourself and it's yours to lose. This is not in any way to disparage the Parallels product, I haven't used it though I've been following its development with interest. Choice and competition are good in the marketplace. Getting there first just sets the bar, and usually because it's a first effort make people aware of what it's lacking and how it can be improved.
If you're going to play games you would obviously want the most speed you can get.
The only game I play anymore runs perfectly on a PIII 500 machine with a Riva TNT card, but it relies heavily Direct3D. The game would run just fine on a tiny fraction of my current machine's power.
There are a few apps that I remember wishing I could run that require Direct3D but really weren't performance critical. I don't want the most speed I can get - I want Direct3D support at all.
Hey I'd mod you up for that. Got a good chuckle out of it :)
Not the screen scraping part, that's OK, but the drag-and-drop is implemented insecurely, by exporting your file system to the VM instance... if you trust Windows with your data, that's fine, but if you're expecting Parallels to act like a sandbox, you better turn that off.
In practice, though, because it IS screen scraping all your Windows windows pop back and forth at the same "level" on your display, which annoyed me enough that I turned it off.
You actually install Windows on the Mac on a drive, or in a virtual drive volume. So any emulation would be on the hardware end. It's not virtual, but passing calls to the equivalent IDE or redirect for hardware. A few things like 3D are probably virtualized to Open GL -- so that would make it slow.
This breakthrough is either an IDE that translates Windows Media 9 (or 10) to OpenGL, or they've found some way to get WM to work.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Actually, I'm using Parallels on the Mac because of very draconian security Policies at our Windows ONLY workplace.
I build Kiosks that grab data from the web, and make great eye candy.
We have an IT department that doesn't support Macs - which means it's the only way to not be forced to log in for guests, or to demo applications at our office. It's because, to make Windows Systems secure for a financial services company -- everything has to be locked down -- most people can't even install software.
So, we get an Image of Windows to run all the apps our visiting agents use, while the Mac handles connections to the Internet. All problems can be solved by overwriting the image with the original locked image.
>> I think this is a break from the conventional reason -- but perhaps will become more common. If you want to do any sort of "insecure" and multimedia work at an office that is "locked down" -- having a Mac is a refuge BECAUSE there is little support. No support means nobody breathing down your neck, I've rarely needed help on a Mac problem so I'm very fine with this.
So, in a Windows environment -- you sometimes need a Mac to run Windows, because it is impossible to change security policies.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
mrseigen implied that a 2.0 release of VMware Fusion had been out for months; my only point was that this wasn't even close to accurate.
But, since you brought it up: Parallels Desktop 3.0 is in release candidate and does have a public time frame for release.
This will be nice once finished.
That isn't entirely true. There's a VMware research paper out there that says turning on those extensions doesn't necessarily increase speed (and in fact sometimes decreases it). Do a Google search for it.
I'll second that.
While a flawed analogy, lets say that Windows users attempting to move to Mac are like people recovering from broken legs or a similar injury which impedes standard walking. You don't just throw a cast on them and tell them to walk out of the hospital, you give them a pair of crutches.
Eventually, they won't need crutches anymore and they're good to go. Until then, people used to Windows need all the help/reasons they can get to bother trying to walk through the Mac OS.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
I've been using VMWare Fusion beta for quite some time now, and it provides hardware-accelerated DirectX 8.1 to guest Windows OS since beta 2. So, Parallels is not the "first-mover" here
It remains to be seen which product will be first to market in a non-beta state, though.
Sig erased via substitution of an identical one.
I run virtualization of different hardware architectures (mainly in my development of a PS2 emulator.) Software virtualization of software will always be fairly efficient without VT. Try getting that kind of performance when you virtualize a totally different hardware architecture. ;)
As for benchmarks? So far, since I'm emulating a game platform, all I have to work with is the FPS and I/O readouts thru the debugger. I've got Shadow of the Colossus (one of the most process-intensive games I know of for the PS2) up to a measly 6 FPS when my original efforts only resulted in 2 FPS (That's still better than the current top-notch PS2 emulator does with the same game, BTW, which only gets 3 FPS on my system. But, this emulator is written specifically to play SotC, and no other game, so my little brag becomes pointless.) Yea, they're the poor-man's type of benchmark, and probably hold no weight, but when I see progress, it's noticable. Wanna know something really funky? In SotC, the software is written partially backwards. Not backwards as in everything is reversed, but backwards as in the game uses it's own software-based timer instead of timing to the hardware. (And people wonder why some scenes in the game only manage to pull 10-15 FPS. That software timer sucks resources down faster than a starving baby suckling it's mother's teat.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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