Parallels 9 for Macbook Pro

[Paragonal17]

Hey guys,

I run Bootcamp Windows 8 on my Macbook Pro purchased in August of 2011. It runs fine. I primarily use it to play some computer games (Warcraft III Frozen Throne mainly) but the constant switching back and forth is growing tiresome. I did a trial of parallels a while back and I remember it was a little choppy and games were unplayable. I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with parallels 9 and Warcraft and if it runs fairly smoothly? I am considering purchasing Parallels but I want some opinions first.

Thanks for any input/advice/suggestions!

[edit] I am running the latest OS.

 

[Dovahkiing]

Trying to run games in a virtual environment is going to be inherently inferior to running them in a native OS.

You could try assigning more RAM and video memory to the virtual machine, but at the end of the day, how big of a pain is it really just to boot into windows for games.

Virtualization, IMO, is more apt for things like using MS office or other such relatively light programming. 3D applications? Not so much.

An SSD would make the reboot time minuscule by the way.

 

[ayeying]

Warcraft 3 shouldn't be a problem. If you were playing stuff like Titanfall, then it's a problem.

 

[magnumpi]

AFAIK video performance is kind of lousy on virtual machines.

 

[Praxis91]

I run P9 to use some of my work apps, but no video involved. On my Late 2013 (2.3ghz/512GB SSD/16gb RAM), I am running W7 x64 for about 9 hours a day without issues (well, sometimes it overheats and goes to login when I'm in Coherence mode and I forget to turn that off before unhooking my 2nd monitor). I use 4 cpu's and 4gb RAM. I could probably do 2 cpu's with the 4GB RAM but it works fine for now.

Anyway, it idles around 45-50 degrees and goes to 65 on occasion (e.g. WebEx or a bunch of tabs in Firefox on either OSX or VM), but so far, so good.

I would imagine that gaming is horrible on a VM, especially anything graphic intensive.

 

[burne]

AFAIK video performance is kind of lousy on virtual machines.

I used to work at a company with a strict windows only policy for desktops. We could have install IA any program on top of windows, but the only allowed OS was windows.

So, I had them install VirtualBox for me. During the 18 months I worked there I ran various linux distros, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris and even an hackintosh as a virtual machine.

Didn't do gaming at work, but day to day graphical desktops are very acceptable as a virtual machine. Currently I run a triple headed mac mini at work with Parallels on it, and if I miss linux as a desktop I can boot a mint linux VM in 15 seconds and enjoy a day working on that. No drama, no problems, smooth sailing all the way.

(Most of my work is herding CentOS boxes so linux is second nature...)