Noob question. Please bear with me...

about the emulator...

do you have a choice? Well.. if you do then I suggest getting parallels because we have it and it is great for gaming and other stuff like coding and html and whatnot... But.. If you don't have a choice well then VMware fusion is great and can play 3d games very smoothy!

Guys, how does Fusion 2.0 performance compare with Bootcamp/WXP?

bostic220 said:

Ok, for Christmas, I am getting the new Aluminum Macbook and one of the accessories that I will be getting with it is VMWare Fusion 2.0. I was wondering if Fusion would allow me to play windows games on my mac such as the Orange Box, Starcraft, Crysis,etc. Again, I apologize if this is obvious, but I am new to Mac, though very excited about getting one.

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Most Starcraft discs have both the PC and MAC versions on it, I know mine does. Blizzard has released a Intel Mac installer as the version right off the CD would need to be run in classic mode which the Intel Macs don't support.

For any games needing much horsepower you should look at running Windows with Bootcamp.

bostic220 said:

Ive done research on Fusion, Parallels, and Bootcamp, and Fusion seems to be the unanimous choice as far as performance and user interface.

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Are you saying the Fusion provides native Windows performance and just as good compatibility as playing over Bootcamp/WXP?
Thanks!

Huntn said:

Are you saying the Fusion provides native Windows performance and just as good compatibility as playing over Bootcamp/WXP?
Thanks!

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A virtual environment will never have full native performance. It's just the nature of the beast. Now certain virtual environment could have better performance over others perhaps.

I use Bootcamp, and have no issues with it, other than the fact that when you first install it youll have to spend a day updating all the drivers.
I use crossover for some other small windows games

I've used both Fusion and Parallels and have found Fusion to be better overall, there also seem to be quite a few disgruntled users of Parallels 4. Fusion is fine for older games, Dawn of War, Max Payne 2, Bloodrayne 2 all run. For games like Crysis you are going to have to Bootcamp as Fusion is a virtual machine and will take too much of a performance hit to run the latest, greatest stuff. Basically, for light use and no need to reboot go for fusion, for heavyweight use go for Bootcamp.

New Parallels 4 blows Fusion out of the water on performance and it has less overhead than Safari now. The Parallels team has gone to great lengths to improve their product, and it shows.

Not enough power

The games are gonna suck because in a virtualized mode, you're not going to get the best performace - especially a game like Crysis which already requires a really high end video card to turn on all the special effects.

I have a 1950XT ATI card on my PC and it doesn't handle all the effects turned on. I can't imagine what a macbook pro would do in a virtual environment but I can guarantee it's not going to be fun.

you have to bootcamp for games.
you cant compare VMWare/parallels/xover with bootcamp
bootcamp actually means running windows natively,
meaning, no resources are used for OS X a that particular moment