With Steam officially hitting Mac in just
a few weeks many Apple gamers have suddenly lost their need to emulate. But, for those who are hoping to get busy in a little
Command & Conquer 4 under Snow Leopard this week -- or any of the other myriad of PC-only gaming options -- virtualization is the only way to go -- short of rebooting into Boot Camp, of course.
Parallels is the most commonly used solution, but how does
VMware's Fusion 3 stack up for gaming? Not too well, as it turns out.
MacTech sat the two down together on matching Mac hardware and ran them through a number of benchmarks, including 3DMark. The results of that test fall heavily in the favor of Parallels, offering better framerates and far more consistent visuals, which you can see for yourself in a video below. Most of the many, many other tests run favor that option as well, but we won't spoil all eight pages worth of results just waiting for you on the other end of that source link.
posted March 16th 2010 9:11AM
VMWare got pwned..
@sshole They are both unable to display the benchmark correctly though. Parallels messes up scaling up the lower resolution (1280x1024), and is unable to draw the 2D 3Dmark GUI (with the FPS counter).
@Someonesimple Woops, i meant "scaling down to".
@sshole There is one thing worth pointing out: VMware has x64 bit os support, so i can use win7 x64 in VMware, where paralells cannot.
@sshole
I just like replying to you.
@insky
win
@chalima Parallels 5 supports Snow Leopard x64..
@sshole engadget... where would more than half my comments go? They never appear on the site, and I promise I don't use cuss words :D
are we sure this test didn't miss any configuration on fusion setup? I mean, I like parallels, but I don't believe vmware is all that bad..
@sshole
@sshole Sorry to be clear I was not attacking you I was laughing at the situation.
@blachole i never said it didnt, i said windows 7 x64 :3
@sshole
great name...
just...
great.
Tried both, ended up putting my money on VMWare, simply because its default install options are less invasive. Nothing bothers me more than Parallels' default "use your mac programs in windows and your windows programs in mac" setup.
@Leindurstit
Only a bloody fool uses a VM to play games, or run CAD software. This stupid review shouldn't even exist. VMWare is meant for other things.
I loved Parallels. Yes, LOVED. Why? Its faster than VMWare and a lot more functional.
BUT:
It's also russian roulette for me. Sometimes as soon as I start my Bootcamp partition with Parallels, the whole system becomes INCREDIBLY slow, like the hard drive got throttled to 1-2mb/s. Anyone else experienced that problem (slow down starts while booting!)? Nothing like this with VMWare.
@k234 That's why I switched from Parallels 3 to VMWare Fusion. VMWare still slows the Mac down on startup but afterwards it runs fine. I don't know, maybe I did something wrong with Parallels, but VMWare just works better for me. Won't switch back.
@k234
Check Activity Monitor. If you run out of RAM, OS X will start paging stuff out to the disk and everything will become painfully slow until it's done. Look at Free RAM, Page Outs, and Swap Used. To correct the situation you can either give the VM less RAM or buy more RAM for your computer. Many MBPs can unofficially support 6GB of RAM, and the newer ones support 8GB (though it's still expensive). I still get page-outs with 6gb sometimes, though, since 10.6.2 seems to have a memory leak (after I quit all my programs I might only have a couple GB free).
@m854 I have 4GB of ram, and a quadcore processor, I doubt thats the problem ;) Win 7 only got 2GB allocated, 2GB should be enough for OS X!
I already checked with activity monitor, only thing I could spot was that the hard drive was not working as it should, VERY low read/write speed and very few HD accesses/s; the numbers SORED up after i shut down the Win7 BootcampVM and quit Parallels (which takes forever, 5-10 minutes to boot up, another 5 mins to shut down, like i have a 10mhz computer)
@k234
sorry dude but that is the problem. you have to remember that the 2gb leftover will be distributed in various ways. Parallels is a layer, and with use its own ram as well, the kernel takes it own ram and all those little apps we install that can work in the background. Sounds like your hard drive is definitely getting paged, or something is writing to the drive and saturating your throughput. when apps also are sitting on claimed ram space, it generally will nto open up as you woudl want it to. anytime your machine gets to around 100mb ram left, its goign to go down hill with any heavy operation you have goign on.
Im an activity monitor junkie and i approve of this message.
@king_electric_warmonger its not the 2GB of RAM. Why? Because it works just fine with VMWare and more importantly, Parallels only slows my system down _sporadically_ even when OS X is freshly booted. What does that mean? Sometimes I have these maaaajor lags and slowdowns, and sometimes not. Though its more often the case then it is not.
Additionally Activity Monitor doesn't tell me that my ram is full and it's writing to the pagefile! There is little to no interaction with the hard drive going on, thats the problem, it's like as soon as I let it boot with Parallels, the hard drive becomes restricted to not deliver more than 2-3MB/s throughput! It's really weird and I have yet to find someone with a similar problem (or I am just too stupid to use google).
@k234
Fusion seems to work better than Parallels for your particular scenario so this is what matters most. One possible explanation for the problem would be that your Windows in Parallels got to its limit and started doing paging - OSX activity monitor will not be accurate in this case, it will put all the blame to Parallels because this is all it 'sees'.
I use Parallels and I can attest that it gets really slow when I push Windows to its limit, mostly because of paging. Perhaps Fusion has a better resource management and plays nicer with OSX.
@thing this issue has nothing to do with windows!
the system starts to slow down BEFORE windows is even loaded, right from the second parallels starts to boot up the virtual machine (e.g. when the VM bios from parallels is loading in the VM window)
I don't run Fusion or Parallels on my Macs anymore. I run Windows on PCs and OS X on Macs. Better video performance. Less software to update and patch.
No VirtualBox? I mean its worth mentioning being that its free and all
@216 - and oh yea I run VMware btw
@216
yeah, i'd also like to see how either of these compare to virtualbox
@216
As usual the free option just isn't good enough for Engadget.
@fourthletter Tell MacTech that. Engadget didn't do the testing.
@fourthletter
Wow, really? Engadget linked to some outside source's content. This is not Engadget's doing at all. Try not being a dick.
@pcdsim
They just did the reprinting under their name like everything else.
It is their fault if fault is due.
@fourthletter Again, MacTech did the testing, not Engadget. I'm not sure how any clearer that can be. Engadget just reported on MacTech's testing. You're just being an asshat.
@fourthletter
They didn't review the free software?!
Someone call the WHAAAAAAMBULANCE!
Seriously though, what was Engadget supposed to do - go over to MacTech's offices and beat them until the also reviewed VirtualBox? Refuse to run the story? Grow up, no one is trying to keep you or your free software down just because it's not mentioned in every relevant article.
@216
Also isn't Parallels 3d software just a hacked version of wined3d, similar to Virtualbox?
You are right, it should be reviewed in the future.
@216
I've tried VirtualBox some time ago and it worked just fine, except that it was a bit behind both Fusion and Parallels in terms of OSX integration. I haven't tried any games so I cannot comment on that, but I would assume that this is not a VirtualBox top priority.
With steam coming to mac there won't be a need to run either or bootcamp, so while it's nice they can do 3D these two program are more for business users who have windows only software they use
@SeveringGecko Because all the Windows games on Steam will magically start to work in OS-X? I'm just hoping the good valve stuff will all be available.
I would love to see how Parallels stacks up against VMWare workstation. Probably wouldn't be a fair test since their on different platforms though.
seriously? People play modern-ish games in VM's?
Playing any game in VM is asking for crap performance, if you must try and game on your mac I'd say bootcamp is the way to go.
Good luck with C&C4 on anything other than the latest iMac, MBP or Mac Pro.
@fourthletter
have you considered CrossOver Games? i've only used it to play counter-strike, but i've heard good things about it.
@Kev007
My Macbook is stuck with Intel GFX so not much mac gaming going on here.
My Games PC is great but I can't see how running a game in VM isn't going to be a total loss of quality and power, just buy a console.
@fourthletter
C&C3 and red alert3 runs pretty good in boot camp on my unibody macbook pro 2.4GHz 2GB DDR3.
I'm going to hazzard a guess that c&c4 will be about the same after turning off all the anti aliasing reducing shadow/shader quality. tbh i've never expected any more from any of my windows laptops in the past.
@fourthletter
C & C 4 runs fine under fusion 3 for me, Although i have stopped playing it because it is a poor excuse for an RTS.
@fourthletter It's not like they are serious PC gamers if they bought a Mac to begin with....
I have used vmware, parallels and virtualbox and for me virtualbox runs a better than parallels it starts windows machine in less time than parallels.
Parallels is the buggiest piece of crap ever and installs stuff where it shouldn't be installing things: /System. VMWare Fusion is just an application. I use to use Parallels but it caused all kinds of problems and update after update didn't help. Fusion has worked reliably from day one. I wouldn't wish Parallels on my worst enemy, let alone a friend.
People use OSX?
In the future I will switching over to a Mac. Been doing alot of video, and audio editing lately. I'm glad Steam is on board. I can't get sick of portal!!! I want cake!!!
uh, Crossover Games anyone?
Parallels is that warm tingly feeling you get after a nice glass of whiskey.
And my virtualization software of choice.