Parallel and mac gaming

[Geoffrey S]

I've recently acquired a nice little MacBook; 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, and 2 GB of RAM. What I've been trying is to run some PC games under Parallel Desktop, but with varied results. A game like Jedi Outcast runs perfectly at the highest settings, but the issue is with more modern games: neither RTW or Half Life 2 work all that well. The problem is that it doesn't seem to matter what graphics settings I choose, I can set it to the lowest settings and then the highest settings, but the difference in framerate is minimal; on top of that, RTW displays strange graphics glitches (green and blue terrain, black units etc).

This makes me think that it's not a matter of my Mac not being powerful enough, since the graphics settings have little influence, but that something else might be an issue (drivers, or something). Has anyone got some more experience with this? Thanks!

(I realise Bootcamp might be a better option for gaming, but there are other things I need the mac for which make Parallel somewhat more appealing.)

[Banquo's Ghost]

I'm afraid the problem is that Parallels cannot run any software with a 3D requirement at the moment. I believe that they are making some efforts in this direction, but Parallels is usually used to run legacy PC productivity software for business rather than games.

Boot Camp however, is excellent for running games but has the drawback of requiring a full copy of Windows XP SP2 and of course, rebooting. I run M2TW really quite well on my MacBook Pro using Boot Camp. The only game I have run under parallels is Ultima Online and its 10 year old 2D graphics.

It certainly isn't drivers, as when installing Boot Camp you make a driver disk that gets everything working nicely under Windows, so the same hardware works fine in the Win environment.

Parallels is just not a gaming environment.

The good news for the future is that some big gaming studios (EA for example) have recently announced that they will use Transgaming's Cider system for ensuring Mac OSX compatability in their titles. Some companies like Blizzard already simultaneously release for the Mac, and ports are encouraged for others, like Civ. CA sadly, don't seem to be interested in any of these options, and so I use Boot Camp to run my beloved MTW for now.

EDIT: That'll teach me! It appears on checking that Parallels has released version 3.0 which claims to run 3D applications. If you are using this version, I don't know what the problem is. I'll have to go and test it out myself. Sorry for wasting your time!

EDIT: I have done some further research and it looks like the 3.0 is, unsurprisingly, very buggy. There's a lot of complaints that DirectX simply doesn't work on many machines, so this may be your problem. It may be better to wait until 3.1 for gaming.

[Stuperman]

that would make sense, IIRC Jedi outcast 2 is quake3 engine>OpenGL

What is the Graphics Accelerator in the Mac book? Intel GMA 950>?

[Geoffrey S]

BG, thanks for your reply. Having messed about with Parallels (indeed, 3.0) I know a number of 3d games run fine. Medieval I, Anachronox, Jedi Outcast all work flawlessly, at highest settings. I guess it is possible that bugs in the new release prevent the most recent games from working; as I said, changing graphics options in RTW or Half Life 2 for instance had almost no effect at all, which makes me curious.

I've now had a glance around their forums. As you say, quite a few people seem to be having issues, particularly with recent games requiring a more recent version of directx. Seems like a matter of overpromising and underdelivering to me, but it was free for me so I shouldn't complain.

Stuperman, yes, it's an Intel GMA 950. If I may, why do you ask? Wouldn't that be good enough to run recent games?

[Geoffrey S]

Okay, done a bit of looking around and it seems Parallels 3.0 only supports up to DirectX 8.1c, so that could be an explanation. As said, Quake 3 engine games run perfectly at all the highest setting, so I'll wait for a while before attempting anything else. Still, seems a bit misleading to me for the developers to post images and videos of Quake 4 running under Parallels, but I'm seeing a lot of those kind of complaints.