gaming with parallels and bootcamp

[plymman]

With some advice from this forum I've now setup vista on a bootcamp partition and have pointed parallels at this installation which all works well. When I boot into vista I have the proper Radeon driver installed and can play games fine on max settings at the highest resolution, however if I try to run a windows game from Parallels in OSX it defaults to the Parallels video driver and 640x480 resolution. Is there any way of running games at full screen/full settings from osx or will I have to reboot into windows each time?

 

[Tarek]

Unfortunately, you will have to reboot into Windows every time. Parallels uses only a very small amount of your graphics card's memory, around 128MB if I remember right, which is terrible.

 

[plymman]

Thats a pain but at least I know thats just the way it is and i havent just buggered up my install!

 

[Rodus]

Parallels has no access to your 3D card, it simply emulates one which is a slow process. Old games may work ok but anything modern and demanding will be bloody awful.

 

[aki]

Well yes and no. You can definitely run games fullscreen under Parallels.

As for performance, that will vary wildly depending on the game and your hardware. I have to say, products like Parallels have come a looooong way. I'm not saying you should be playing Mass Effect or Dragon Age under Parallels; but you can run some fairly modern games and still get reasonable performance (as long as you are interested in teh game and not the graphical glitz - for framerates and antialiasing etc you still have to go bootcamp).

To be honest I don't really use Parallels much for gaming anymore. But it's not true that you can't do, depending on the title. You really have to try and see.