Note that you cannot use both Undo Disks and Snapshots on the same virtual machine. In a lab setup, a feature like this can ensure that any changes made by students won’t survive beyond the next launch of Parallels. Although turned off by default, this feature lets you undo all changes made to your virtual machine during a session: when you shut down the virtual machine, it will revert to its previous state. The Undo Disks feature is like an always-active Snapshot. You can create Snapshots for the other Parallels-supported OSes as well.
Creating a Snapshot is more space-efficient than simply duplicating your virtual machine’s disk image in the Finder: I created two Snapshots of my 10GB Windows XP Pro virtual disk, and the total space required was just over 1GB. Create a Snapshot before installing a new program if you want to revert your system at some point, you can do so using the Snapshot Manager. Of your virtual machine’s setup at a point in time. A Snapshot is just what you think it might be-a The iMac had 2GB RAM and an ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card.-Macworld Lab testing by Rob Griffiths and James Galbraith.Īlso new in this version is the ability to create Snapshots of your virtual machine. The MacBook Pro had 2GB RAM and an ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card, and the Mac Pro had 4GB RAM and an ATI Radeon X1900 XT graphics card.
All systems were running Mac OS X 10.4.9. Doom 3 was set to use high video setting, 1,024 by 768 resolution, V-sync No, Antialiasing Off, and all other settings set to Yes. Figures are frames per second as reported by Prey. All other settings in the Advanced 1 and Advanced 2 video configuration tabs were set to Yes. Prey tests ran in a window, with medium texture quality, highest shader detail, no anti-aliasing or vertical sync, and image anisotropy at 8x. Best result for each system inĪll tests were run at 1,024 by 768 resolution.
Parallels Desktop 3.0 Game Tests Prey Time Demo
We are working with our colleagues at PC World to sort out the problems we’ve encountered with World Bench tests and hope to post results soon. Some tests would not completely run other tests intermittently corrupted our versions of Windows.
We attempted some tests with WorldBench 6, but despite numerous attempts, we were unable to come up with conclusive results. Gaming tests were not the only tests we performed. But if your gaming needs are mainly limited to older titles, or if you’re willing to play in a somewhat smaller window, Parallels 3 provides a usable solution, at least for some games, without rebooting. If you want the best Windows gaming experience, use Boot Camp to turn your Mac into a real Windows PC. To play Prey via Parallels on that machine, both resolution and image quality would have to be reduced to get a usable frame rate.ĭoom 3 results on the iMac were similar to Prey on the MacBook Pro-you’d need to reduce the window size and graphic quality settings to get decent gameplay. But Prey on the MacBook Pro is another story. At no time, though, did it feel unplayable. When I was testing Prey’s actual gameplay, I found that frames per second (FPS) varied between about 20 and 60 (the latter is where Prey caps it during game play) on the Mac Pro in Parallels. The results could be improved, of course, by using a smaller window or lower quality graphics settings. (For more on gaming with Parallels, see Peter Cohen’sĪs you can see from the chart below, there’s a substantial performance hit for running either game under Parallels. But for those games that do work, the results can be good-especially for older games with less stringent graphics requirements.
However, other games I tested, such as Microsoft’s Flight Simulator and Motocross Madness 2, didn’t run after installation. Neither is on Parallels’ list of tested games, but both worked quite well.
I also installed and played a demo of theĭriving game. For instance, I installed and tested Infogrames’īoarderZone, an older PC snowboarding game. Of games known to be compatible, though others may work as well. This feature is disabled by default, as it’s still somewhat experimental, but it can be easily enabled in the virtual machine’s preferences. Parallels 3 now offers support for accelerated graphics (both OpenGL and DirectX), allowing some 3-D games to run within Parallels.
The recent release of Parallels Desktop 3.0 is evidence of that: this first-ever paid upgrade has over 50 new or improved features. But things are moving quickly in the virtualization arena, and much has changed in the last year. I found it to be a fast and versatile way to run Windows, Linux, and many other systems within OS X. It was just about a year ago that I first