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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.
If they are able to get performance within 10 or 15% of native, I'd be impressed and happy. Sometimes you just want to play a casual game and don't plan on playing for an extended period which makes rebooting a pain. Since Parallels allows you to boot off of your bootcamp partition in a VM, it'll be nice to be able to do both.
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
If you're going to play games you would obviously want the most speed you can get.
Not really. If I can get 30 FPS in the games I want to play, I'll be happy. A few extra FPS that are ultimately irrelevant aren't worth a reboot, especially into Windows.
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.
For you, Boot Camp makes sense. Me, I'm in the opposite situation -- I do almost all my work in OS X, but write apps which occasionally have to be tested with Windows. So Parallels is the perfect solution. I'm not really concerned about squeezing every ounce of speed out of Windows because I don't spend much time in it; I just want to drop into it every few days to make sure that what I'm doing works, preferably without having to reboot my machine.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
As you said, for people like you or gamers, Boot Camp is the way to go. "You and gamers" are not the majority of computer users, thus that is why "the rest of us" who need it will use Parallels.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
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.