Gaming in Parallels with the late 2013 iMacs

malvicus said:

So, I saw a video showing off a video of Sonic the Hedgehog choking a bit in Parallels on a maxxed out iMac 27 inch. I am anxiously awaiting word on the performance of the new iMacs when gaming in Parallels. Any thoughts?

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I can't speak directly for an imac, but I do have Parallels 9 on my MBPr with the GT650m. In my experience if you are standing still in a game you get decent FPS, but as soon as you move the camera or character it all goes to hell like it's trying to read the data off a slow HDD which causes stuttering. Parallels 9 claimed higher performance but I see no difference from 8 to be honest. I know you can argue the iMac has more power, but if it is a disk issue then it doesn't matter how much better the CPU/GPU are.

You still just can't beat bootcamping for games.

Parallels is great for older games and games that are not too demanding of the hardware. Otherwise though, you really need to bootcamp it for new demanding games. There is just too much overhead running a virtual machine for many new games to run well.

I do keep a Windows XP virtual machine that I use for some older titles and its nice for that. For anything newer than 2007, I just reboot to Windows 7 for Windows games.

That said, I enjoy native Mac titles the most whenever possible and fortunately there is quite a lot of good stuff to choose from thanks to Feral, Asypr, Blizzard and others.

X-Ravin said:

I can't speak directly for an imac, but I do have Parallels 9 on my MBPr with the GT650m. In my experience if you are standing still in a game you get decent FPS, but as soon as you move the camera or character it all goes to hell like it's trying to read the data off a slow HDD which causes stuttering. Parallels 9 claimed higher performance but I see no difference from 8 to be honest. I know you can argue the iMac has more power, but if it is a disk issue then it doesn't matter how much better the CPU/GPU are.

You still just can't beat bootcamping for games.

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Drivers probably. I played a truck sim on p8 and got 20 frames maybe 25 thats not horrible and i was using a release preview of w8. And i was using a 4870m ati. The game uses opengl i think so games that use that engine will probably be alot better for gaming.

P8 is using dx10 which is really old.

malvicus said:

So, I saw a video showing off a video of Sonic the Hedgehog choking a bit in Parallels on a maxxed out iMac 27 inch. I am anxiously awaiting word on the performance of the new iMacs when gaming in Parallels. Any thoughts?

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do you have a link?

I looked into this, and just decided to boot windows from a USB 3 disk. Didn't use bootcamp because that only wants to partition your internal disk.

MrGimper said:

I looked into this, and just decided to boot windows from a USB 3 disk. Didn't use bootcamp because that only wants to partition your internal disk.

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How did you get all the correct drivers on the Windows disk? Can you just boot from any Windows install or did you need to do anything special?

glitch44 said:

How did you get all the correct drivers on the Windows disk? Can you just boot from any Windows install or did you need to do anything special?

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http://bleeptobleep.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/mac-install-windows-7-or-8-on-external.html?m=1

Followed the instructions there. Boots nice and quick from my USB 3 Samsung 830 SSD