37 replies to this topic

[Hansi]

Like yesterdays news wasn't enough:
http://www.parallels...orkstation/mac/

[steiner designer]

Hansi, on April 6th 2006, 05:57 AM, said:

Like yesterdays news wasn't enough:
http://www.parallels...orkstation/mac/

Hmm...kinda hard to believe these guys cooked this whole thing up in a day or two - did they must have had some kind of inside track on Bootcamp WAY before the public beta.

[Hansi]

steiner designer, on April 6th 2006, 01:41 PM, said:

Hmm...kinda hard to believe these guys cooked this whole thing up in a day or two - did they must have had some kind of inside track on Bootcamp WAY before the public beta.

This doesn't have anything to do with BootCamp to my knowledge, this was announced as a possibility back in December and confirmed that they were going to release it soon in March.

[Tesseract]

Yep, boot loaders have nothing to do with virtualisation. And yes, they have been working on it for quite a while. It uses the hardware virtualisation features in the new Intel chips.

[dj phat 2000]

So, now to play games all we have to do is boot up XP under OS X like VPC and have near native speeds (as if we just rebooted in the first place) and can play any game we want.  

its all over folks.  The writing is on the wall.  Mac gaming is pretty much going to take a back set to this.

[placebo]

I'd still prefer to boot in XP for the inevitably better performance than having OS X running in the background while I play.

On the prompt release of Parallel, perhaps they had everything worked out but the Mac's ability to run Windows, and Boot Camp was the final piece of the puzzle?

[dj phat 2000]

If your running a duel core Mac, I think you will be just fine as far as performance goes.  Most things in windows aren't SMP anyway. But, for games and such that will use SMP, true I would boot XP too.  But figure that old games like CS, HL, and a ton others will not care about another chip.  This is pretty great to have.

[Kanamit]

I'm not surprised this happend, but I am surprised this happened so fast. All this windows on mac news so close together is giving me hypertension.

[DaveyJJ]

Does the Parallel's virtualization technology access the full 3D card like Bootcamp does? I haven't seen anyone say yes or no to this one. And if so, I'd like to see a 3DMark score using Bootcamp versus virtualization.

[Hansi]

DaveyJJ, on April 6th 2006, 04:31 PM, said:

Does the Parallel's virtualization technology access the full 3D card like Bootcamp does? I haven't seen anyone say yes or no to this one. And if so, I'd like to see a 3DMark score using Bootcamp versus virtualization.

Nope, only supports VESA 3.0 so only 2D.

[Mister Mumbles]

This is certainly becoming more and more interesting. Although, I didn't see or read anything about graphics card support in Parrallels's solution. It also depends on how fast those "near-native" speeds really are.

Edit: Didn't see Hansi's last post until I put this one up.

[DaveyJJ]

Hansi, on April 6th 2006, 12:34 PM, said:

Nope, only supports VESA 3.0 so only 2D.

I'll stick then with the method that allows me to play you know what.

[the Battle Cat]

Admitting that I am numb from the nose up, someone please define and explain "virtualization" to me.

[bobbob]

It makes XP think it has the computer all to itself, when really, OSX is there, too. Intel's newest CPUs (or not, Apple nor Intel really say) have VT, which does most of the work in hardware - whereas before, certain things were done slowly in software.

[tiskippy]

I can both offer an explanation and some idea of how it works, compared to Boot Camp (been playing with both on the new iMac at work.)

Virtualization is a technology where, simply, the computer is able to run a virtual computer within itself.  It has its own hard drive & optical drive (represented with disc images) and processor.  Basically, its like Virtual PC, only minus the emulation.  In VPC, the system has to convert PPC commands to Intel on the fly - hence the speed issues.  With virtualization, the processor is the same type (Intel to Intel) so there is little to no speed problems.  However, virtualization doesn't allow access to the native hardware - it all comes through simulation.  This is why the Parallels solution isn't in any way viable for 3D gaming right now, it can't access your video card or any other systems on the Mac.  

I've tried both systems out on the iMac at work.  Both are easy to set up, though I found the Parallels solution to be a bit more challenging.  The Parallels solution 'boots' very quickly, maybe in 10 seconds or less.  But I found it kind of difficult to control, the mouse is jumpy and hard to move precisely (using the Mighty Mouse.)  I wouldn't use this option for Photoshop/Illustrator/design work.  However, if I was in a business setting and needed that lone Windows app for work, this is the perfect way to use it.

I'm not going to say much about Boot Camp since everyone is talking about it.  I'll just say, I've tried Black & White 2 on it and it runs great.  Personally though, I still will hold out for the Mac ports of games (Civ 4 for example.)  I'm all about supporting Mac developers and I'd rather wait a few months and not have to bother with rebooting.

Let me know if anyone has questions about this stuff...I'm happy to try to answer them.

[Smoke_Tetsu]

Don't you still also have the overhead of running a program on top of 2 OS'?

[tiskippy]

Smoke_Tetsu, on April 6th 2006, 05:29 PM, said:

Don't you still also have the overhead of running a program on top of 2 OS'?

True, the Parallels application will have some overhead.  However, I never saw both of the processors on the iMac go over 60% or so while I was running WinXP Pro on it.  This is on a 17" iMac, btw.

[tthiel]

The Windows OS is SMP.  Has been since NT.  More and more Windows apps are because of dual core procs.  Not as nice as on a UNix based OS but still a big improvement.  For games I doubt virtualization would be a great idea.  I intend to have both.  Dul boot for games and VM for quick and dirty open Visio files etc.

dj phat 2000, on April 6th 2006, 09:08 AM, said:

If your running a duel core Mac, I think you will be just fine as far as performance goes.  Most things in windows aren't SMP anyway. But, for games and such that will use SMP, true I would boot XP too.  But figure that old games like CS, HL, and a ton others will not care about another chip.  This is pretty great to have.

[Tesseract]

There is almost no overhead with hardware-supported virtualisation. Also one OS could be essentially "paused" while running the other. The main drawback is that most OSes demand exclusive control of hardware, so the virtualiser has to provide emulated hardware to all but the "primary" OS. This could be worked around by way of kernel hacks in each OS though.

[bobbob]

Smoke_Tetsu, on April 6th 2006, 03:29 PM, said:

Don't you still also have the overhead of running a program on top of 2 OS'?

1) the processor is virtualized, so there's a little overhead for OS-level commands (less with VT)  but none for the rest
2) the discs, video, etc. are mostly just big blocks of memory, so yes, XP still has to draw into window, load files, etc., but it's no worse than any other OSX app drawing into a window, loading a file, etc.