It worked seamlessly with Windows 8.1 and the company was on top of things when Mavericks was released.
The polish of the experience really came out in our testing. Parallels Desktop 9 has been the industry standard for as long as it’s been possible to virtualize Windows within OS X. Both have a great track record and with these latest two builds, bring even more to the table. But, in any discussion involving virtualization on the Mac, these ones looked at here deserve to be discussed before any other solution. There are other virtualization offerings and Apple itself encourages its users to use Boot Camp when that Windows-only application comes a calling. What is there to say that hasn’t already been covered? These two products are by no means the only way to run Windows on your Mac. I didn’t expect to be able to max out each game we tried, but having had considerable good fortune with playing games on this notebook when using Boot Camp, I honestly expected a little bit better of an experience than what we saw. With that being said, this is also an older MacBook, so the blame of our poor game performance cannot be fairly blamed on the either of our virtualization products. I originally planned on doing something like this but after my experience with a far-from-demanding game like Age of Empires II HD, the decision was made to scrap the deep-dive into gaming on Windows running on both Parallels and Fusion. I know this wasn’t a deep-dive into what we can expect from our Windows-as-a-VM gaming experience. Like Half-Life 2, the only quasi respectable playing experience was done at 800×600 and with the detail dialed way down. Easily my favorite racing game on the PC, GRID 2 received positive marks from our own Rob Williams last summer. The last game we wanted to try out was GRID 2. As I stated with AoE II HD, you are better off running Windows in Boot Camp, rather in virtualization. In Parallels we saw 26 FPS and in Fusion, 25. Dropping the resolution down to 800×600, our experience was a little better. In Parallels we averaged 18 FPS and in Fusion, 16. Again running in its native resolution, the game was practically unplayable. In our testing of the two virtualization platforms, I simply ran the original HL2. Half-Life 2, personally my favorite game, in its heyday was a game that we used in our own benchmark tests, as well as its fantastic later Episodes 1 and 2. Both Parallels and Fusion handled AoE II HD the same way. With a connected mouse, it is certainly playable but if my primary reason for running Windows within either of our virtualization apps was to play games, I would be far better served running Windows in Boot Camp instead. It wasn’t that the game got choppy in certain areas, it was just an overall lethargic feel to the gameplay as a whole.
#Mac parallels vs vmware full#
Running in full screen at my MacBook Pro’s default resolution of 1680×1050, the game was playable but nothing that got me overly excited. After installing it on both the Parallels and Fusion VMs, I began a quick game against the AI.
The NVIDIA GT 330M and its 512MB of memory should be able to handle the games we chose to test with, but how they handle them within a VM is another thing altogether.Īge of Empires II HD, remade to not look horrible at today’s resolutions, was the first game that we tested. Keep in mind that this is a somewhat older MacBook, a “Mid 2010” to be exact. I started out by installing Steam and then downloading Age of Empires II HD, Half-Life 2 and to change things up a bit, GRID 2. In this article, using both Parallels and Fusion, I attempted to play a handful of games.
#Mac parallels vs vmware mac#
I know that’s quite the oversimplification, but the point I am trying to make is that the running Windows on your Mac for gaming purposes only is not advisable in this editor’s honest opinion. With that being said, you are still running games within a virtual machine that sits ON TOP of the OS X operating system that is running directly off of your hardware. There are games that you can play, and like most computers, the greater the hardware, the better the experience. What kind of games can I play and how well do they run? When answered honestly, I say not well. One of the questions I get asked often when I discuss running Windows on my Mac is gaming.