Parallels Working On 3D Acceleration

[MacRumors]

Parallels spokesman Ben Roudolph has revealed that Parallels is working to support 3D acceleration in an upcoming release of the company's flagship Mac product, Parallels Desktop for Mac.What's more, Parallels Desktop for Mac will see "fast 3D graphics support," presumably to help cater to gamers who want to run Windows games without having to reboot their machine using Boot Camp and a separate Windows partition. --via MacWorld
The news comes as Microsoft has announced plans to cease development of a univeral-binary version of VirtualPC for Mac and VMWare is showing off a beta of their virtualization soluation. Both VirtualPC and VMWare to date do not offer full 3D acceleration. However, recent announcements by TransGaming and CodeWeavers, both of which promise to allow more games to run well natively in Mac OS X (albeit via different methods), has stepped up competition in the Mac gaming realm.

Article Link: Parallels Working On 3D Acceleration

 

[yellow]

Good Newsies!

 

[amac4me]

Nice. I welcome anything that would get more people to make the Switch. If Parallels can get this to market, it would help Apple.

 

[Grimace]

Let the gaming thread begin...

 

[bigandy]

i'll take eight!

 

[vniow]

This would seriously kick ass.

I'm curious how they would acheive it though, would it be able to access the full (or at least partial) acceleration of the graphics card or be emulating a seperate one, sort of like Virtual PC did on the PPC platform but more powerful?

 

[Eidorian]

Great news!

Even it's only limited due to shader issues I'd love to be able to play my older 3D games without rebooting.

 

[Akira]

Forget games, think about CAD and 3D software!

Finally AutoCAD and Maya on a MacBook Pro, while being able to do the rest of your work in Mac apps.

 

[Xacto]

3d

If you run games with Bootcamp, will it take advantage of the 3D card?

 

[lar34]

Very Toasty indeed, bring on the games. However I do have an architect friend who needs AutoCAD on a Mac. So this is good news indeed.

 

[kainjow]

Awesome news. Unless something drastic happens soon, native Mac games aren't in a good position right now

 

[longofest]

This would seriously kick ass.

I'm curious how they would acheive it though, would it be able to access the full (or at least partial) acceleration of the graphics card or be emulating a seperate one, sort of like Virtual PC did on the PPC platform but more powerful?

You are basically talking about a serious amount of development work if they were to do it right. Parallels would have to look at its GPU hardware and determine what kind of functions it can support (i.e. Shaders? How many pipelines? etc...). Then, they would have to write their own graphics drivers in order to facilitate the communications between the Mac OS X graphics drivers and the Virtual Machine. Writing graphics drivers that support all of the "fancy" aspects of modern machines is not very easy to do, and then getting them to communicate with the host OS is another beast in of itself.

You will probably see some overhead as well. It will be interesting to see how efficient Parallels is able to make the process.

 

[Lollypop]

Im dying to know how they will do it, and what Direct X they will support, I could run a few very old games in Parallels without 3d support and it all running on the CPU.

Maybe they will create a virtual driver that translates the windows Direct X instructions to openGL for mac and then simply display those results or something... these are exciting days for the mac indeed!

edit: second time today someone says exactly the same thing as I did the exact time I say it... must be a slow day for me

 

[kenaustus]

Sad to see Parallels push MS out of the market . . .

Overall I think Parallels is going to win this market unless VMWare comes out with a very good product at a very good price. At least we can enjoy the competition over the next few years.

 

[longofest]

If you run games with Bootcamp, will it take advantage of the 3D card?

Yes. BootCamp allows fully native 3d performance, and also allows Windows to utilize all available CPU power so you don't have the burden of a host OS (i.e. Mac OS X) running in the background.

However, this means every time you want to game, you have to re-start you computer. Parallels is trying to take out that step for all but the most hardware-intensive games (as then I'm sure you'd run into the fact that you have the overhead of virtualization).

 

[ColdFlame87]

I imagine nothing will be as efficient as actually running games by booting into XP im guessing running them through parallels will make the RAM requirements much higher, with the OS X + Parallels +Game all running at the same time!!

 

[iKwick7]

Forget games, think about CAD and 3D software!

Finally AutoCAD and Maya on a MacBook Pro, while being able to do the rest of your work in Mac apps.

Exactly what I was thinking! Great for my macbook, but even better for a Mac pro! (which I will be getting sooner or later). I'm definately sold!

 

[walrus]

3d acceleration in VMware

Actually, VMWare does have experimental 3d acceleration support in VMWare Player (at least). It basically routes open-gl calls to the host OS's open-gl interface - I imagine Parallels will take a similar tack. Yes, I have tried this, and it works somewhat well. It's enough for simple Open-GL apps to work with pretty good speed under virtualized windows in Linux. (Gentoo Linux in my case)

(FYI this describes how to turn on the acceleration in VMWare Workstation in Ubuntu Linux: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=84344)

 

[nagromme]

If you run games with Bootcamp, will it take advantage of the 3D card?

Yes.

Awesome news. Unless something drastic happens soon, native Mac games aren't in a good position right now

Agreed--but I think something drastic IS going to happen soon: the growth of the Mac market as a whole. That is a positive to help outweigh some of the sales native game companies will lose to Windows solutions.

Remember two things about the Windows solutions to date:

1. You still have to buy a copy of Windows. Some people will do that, but NOT the whole market of Mac gamers.

2. MANY people were ALREADY willing to game in Windows (and used a PC to do it). So the people running Windows games on a Mac aren't in fact all "lost customers"--many of them are just doing what they always did (only easier).

So I think there's a sizable chunk of native Mac game demand left. I know I'm part of it myself!

A smaller chunk than before? Very possibly--BUT a smaller chunk of a much larger whole, as Mac sales continue to rise.

Only time will tell, and I can see why these are scary, uncertain times for some Mac game companies. But I expect native Mac games AND Windows ports/conversions to live on.

And for Mac gameERS, things are looking better than ever.

 

[longofest]

Actually, VMWare does have experimental 3d acceleration support in VMWare Player (at least). It basically routes open-gl calls to the host OS's open-gl interface - I imagine Parallels will take a similar tack. Yes, I have tried this, and it works somewhat well. It's enough for simple Open-GL apps to work with pretty good speed under virtualized windows in Linux. (Gentoo Linux in my case)

(FYI this describes how to turn on the acceleration in VMWare Workstation in Ubuntu Linux: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=84344)

Fair enough... I changed the story to say "full 3d acceleration".

 

[IlluminatedSage]

Sounds like a good idea. but i am a little bit sceptical with regard to gaming performance.

Lets see what the best possibility is for game performance. Transgaming or this solution.

I just want to be able to have games which perform well.

 

[walrus]

Fair enough... I changed the story to say "full 3d acceleration".

Wow, that's fast! Frankly, it seems not all that many even know of VMWare's feature since it's not well documented (and really experimental). And by most, I'll include an awful lot of people who use VMWare regularly.

Anyway, this is all largely irrelevant to me (even though I bought a copy of Parallels, I own a macbook, and frankly don't play games all that much)... now if they got SMP working for guest OSes, upped the limits on disk size, made the sessions resize screen resolutions arbitrarily, and well, integrated all of the other features from vmware server, I'd be pretty pleased. (of course, it'd be nice to have 4 gigs of ram on this macbook then =)

 

[Kid Red]

K, so what about those of us without an Intel mac? Now that VPC is dead, are we left out in the cold?

 

[ZildjianKX]

Looks like we might be able to enable Aero in Vista if this is true...

 

[teme]

Sure these news are good, but Apple doesn't have a hardware for switching gamers...