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Late '08 MacBook Pro - VMWare Fusion - Gaming Performance

P

pyles

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 29, 2008
28
0
Hey guys, I have the new late 08 MacBook Pro with VMWare Fusion 2 running a bootcamp partition.

I want to be able to run some light gaming, games on the Steam engine like Counterstrike Source and Day of Defeat Source, I don't want this setup to be running Crysis or Fallout 3 (or anything on HIGH settings), but just to pop over for a quick game while in VMWare instead of restarting would be very nice.

In day of defeat source (released in 2005..) I get 20 FPS.. Not playable in the least (lowest settings running native 1440x900 or whatever it is res).

Included is a screenshot of the dialog I get from Steam when opening the game.

I have installed VMWare tools.

Any suggestions or do I just need to deal with rebooting into Bootcamp?

It says my video card is not supported, but I have the new macbook with the 9600 in it, and I play fine with 100FPS in that game in Bootcamp, is there a way to have nvidia controlling my video card driver instead of VMWare's driver or what route can I take?

Thanks!

SCREENSHOT HERE
 
1)Virtual machines are not supposed to be used for gaming.
2)Source engine is not "Light" gaming at all. It is a full blown 3d shooter! Just because it was released in 2005 does not mean it is old and can be run on any thing.. The soruce Engine is still widely used! I am surpised you can even get 20fps.
3)In a virtual machine you are splitting resources between the virtual machine and host machine.... Not what you want to do for games.
 
VPrime said:
1)Virtual machines are not supposed to be used for gaming.
2)Source engine is not "Light" gaming at all. It is a full blown 3d shooter! Just because it was released in 2005 does not mean it is old and can be run on any thing.. The soruce Engine is still widely used! I am surpised you can even get 20fps.
3)In a virtual machine you are splitting resources between the virtual machine and host machine.... Not what you want to do for games.
Click to expand...

Ok, I do understand that, but is there a way to not use VM's video card driver in VMWare and use the Nvidia instead, or would that even more so hinder the performance?

Thanks.
 
No. You're running a "Virtual" system, that means "Virtual" hardware, especially on the video card.

The video card, right now, is software based. It will run extremely slow. Until VMWare or Parallels or Sun finds a way to utilize the actual video card, gaming in a virtual machine would be very very slow.
 
ayeying said:
No. You're running a "Virtual" system, that means "Virtual" hardware, especially on the video card.

The video card, right now, is software based. It will run extremely slow. Until VMWare or Parallels or Sun finds a way to utilize the actual video card, gaming in a virtual machine would be very very slow.
Click to expand...

Dang, I understand that too.

Thanks guys.

Oh and I do have bootcamp installed, I was just looking for a way to play a quick game without rebooting and having that hassle.

:)
 
pyles said:
Hey guys, I have the new late 08 MacBook Pro with VMWare Fusion 2 running a bootcamp partition.

I want to be able to run some light gaming, games on the Steam engine like Counterstrike Source and Day of Defeat Source, I don't want this setup to be running Crysis or Fallout 3 (or anything on HIGH settings), but just to pop over for a quick game while in VMWare instead of restarting would be very nice.

In day of defeat source (released in 2005..) I get 20 FPS.. Not playable in the least (lowest settings running native 1440x900 or whatever it is res).

Included is a screenshot of the dialog I get from Steam when opening the game.

I have installed VMWare tools.

Any suggestions or do I just need to deal with rebooting into Bootcamp?

It says my video card is not supported, but I have the new macbook with the 9600 in it, and I play fine with 100FPS in that game in Bootcamp, is there a way to have nvidia controlling my video card driver instead of VMWare's driver or what route can I take?

Thanks!

SCREENSHOT HERE
Click to expand...

pyles, do some research on wine for mac (I think it's called darwine). Or take the easy route and pay the $$ for crossover. They package up wine and make it real easy for anyone to use on the Mac.

The advantage? You can play any steam game (include cs source and dod) natively (more or less :) in MacOSX.

I play it on my core duo 2.53 macbook pro with the 512mb video card. It is as good as or better than my PC. In fact the trackpad even works really good for an FPS (Surprisingly!). Just doesn't work well in close dogfighting type situations where you have to spin and shoot quickly.

I haven't checked the framerates, but it runs without glitch and emulates the keys in a way that is intuitive / comfortable to game play (e.g. I duck with the cmd key, jump with space, and use the wsdf or arrow keys). It also works with my right click on the trackpad.

They even let you try out crossover before you buy it.

The only thing that didn't work for me was attempting to purchase games from steam through crossover. For that I had to do it on the PC. After I bought them, steam downloaded them just fine and I was able to play them as normal.

joseph
 
peanuts said:
pyles, do some research on wine for mac (I think it's called darwine). Or take the easy route and pay the $$ for crossover. They package up wine and make it real easy for anyone to use on the Mac.

The advantage? You can play any steam game (include cs source and dod) natively (more or less :) in MacOSX.

I play it on my core duo 2.53 macbook pro with the 512mb video card. It is as good as or better than my PC. In fact the trackpad even works really good for an FPS (Surprisingly!). Just doesn't work well in close dogfighting type situations where you have to spin and shoot quickly.

I haven't checked the framerates, but it runs without glitch and emulates the keys in a way that is intuitive / comfortable to game play (e.g. I duck with the cmd key, jump with space, and use the wsdf or arrow keys). It also works with my right click on the trackpad.

They even let you try out crossover before you buy it.

The only thing that didn't work for me was attempting to purchase games from steam through crossover. For that I had to do it on the PC. After I bought them, steam downloaded them just fine and I was able to play them as normal.

joseph
Click to expand...

Thanks peanuts, I will look into Crossover, tried Darwine, never could get it working though!
 
When it was explained to me that Fusion is not really able to run games I felt like Fusion's advertising department are a bunch of liers. There site show it as being able to run games.

They use Gears of War as the example, Gears is a resource hog even on the 360 which is it's native platform, the frame rate is a constant 21fps in cut scenes on the 360 according to Epic Games. So if it can barely run at pace on the 360 I have got to guess that the pictures on Vmwares web site must be photoshoped cause I don't see how Gears could run in emulation on current gen hardware and software.
 
DELTAsnake said:
When it was explained to me that Fusion is not really able to run games I felt like Fusion's advertising department are a bunch of liers. There site show it as being able to run games.

They use Gears of War as the example, Gears is a resource hog even on the 360 which is it's native platform, the frame rate is a constant 21fps in cut scenes on the 360 according to Epic Games. So if it can barely run at pace on the 360 I have got to guess that the pictures on Vmwares web site must be photoshoped cause I don't see how Gears could run in emulation on current gen hardware and software.
Click to expand...

Do they specify how they test it? For all we know the Fusion team could be testing it on an 8 Core Mac Pro with 32GB Ram and quad graphics cards with 4 256GB SSD's in a hardware Raid 0 stripe array. In which case they probably would get fairly good graphics performance ;)
 
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