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Parallels Working On 3D Acceleration

Oooo, funky. Im sure i read that Paralells runs at near native speed, so taking into account the 3D aspect... i'd say it would be about 90% native speed give or take.

*closes VPC6* god that app is crap... glad its being killed off, although, they could redo a PPC version atleast. Meh.
 
nagromme said:
Yes.

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!

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

Yep, i play on my pc tower. woudnt mind getting a new mac tower, or imac with better graphics card.

and a macbook pro (with merom)

Essentially that way i could then play, work and travel with what i need for my house.
 
Update

Saw this in the Parallels forums (direct link)
Andrew @ Parallels said:
3D support feature is under investigation. I can't promise we will implement it in particular version, but we do understand it is important for our customers and we are concerned to support it.
Click to expand...
So don't get your hopes up people...
 
Macrumors said:


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.



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 <a href"https://www.macrumors.com/pages/2006/06/20060630170338.shtml"]CodeWeavers[/url], 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.

Digg This
Click to expand...



Wow. Do these guys ever have any bad news to report? Much less any bad news whatsoever to report about this product? This is ****ing awesome! Guys, we are in a whole new arena with Apple nowadays. Welcome to the good life :D
 
I have been working with VMWare quite a lot for over a year, and didn't know about this feature (which is over a year old) until a friend pointed it out to me.

I'm not entirely sure how it works to be honest, but yeah, I think it's essentially an open-gl interface in the Vmware virtual video card driver for windows provided by Vmware tools (Parallels has an equivalent) that provides hooks for opengl calls. When the opengl functions are called on the virtual video card driver, the vmware driver will then pass it off to the actual opengl interface on the host-os' actual video card driver. By no means is it a perfect solution, especially since I don't know if there's ANY direct-x acceleration possible. (unless one were to use a direct-x->opengl interface at some point, or if someone develops a direct-x layer for OS X)

In VMware you also need to allocate part of the video card's ram for the purpose of the guest OS. (I have no idea how this would work on a macbook or something else without dedicated video ram)

Mind you my experience with this feature is limited to about 20 minutes of messing around with settings, and trying to load grand theft auto vice city. It didn't work, but the open-gl screen savers built into windows did work just fine, and were clearly 3d accelerated. I have a friend however, who is able to game relatively well on a linux system running games under vmware with the 3d acceleration pass through working. For me, it's largely irrelevant since I rarely, if ever, play games. However, in addition to the other features I'd love to see in parallels (SMP, etc), I'd LOVE to see someone build a virtualization tool that allows guest-oses to have full access to the video overlay, so you can play videos/etc in the guest-OS with reasonable performance.

As for being a geek - are you under the impression for some reason that I am not??

mkrishnan said:
Yeah, I had never heard of this feature. I don't use VMWare though. I'm just a geek. :eek: ;) :eek:

So VMWare's implementation is essentially an API bridge of sorts, right? It detects an outgoing video call coming down, and it decodes it and translates it into the graphics APIs of the host? Doesn't this approach mean that incompatibility issues will crop up when the system gets bogged down in figuring out what the calls means or mis-interprets one?

I wonder in some relation... now that dual cores dominate new processors from Intel, and virtualization has become a big deal, are video card manufacturers developing GPUs that support virtualization in some analogy to the way the new CPUs do? Or for that matter, is Intel working on such a feature with their integrated chipset?
Click to expand...
 
walrus said:
As for being a geek - are you under the impression for some reason that I am not??
Click to expand...

Nope, you've made a compelling case. :eek: ;) :D

Thank you for all the technical info! :) As you say, sounds imperfect, but it's a work in progress, and it has some potential. :)
 
I'm glad to provide technical info, but I do need to make it clear that much of that is entirely conjecture.

As for proving my geekiness, I'm glad to finally be able to retire that trying case. Whew! =)

mkrishnan said:
Nope, you've made a compelling case. :eek: ;) :D

Thank you for all the technical info! :) As you say, sounds imperfect, but it's a work in progress, and it has some potential. :)
Click to expand...
 
well now that

I re-bought most of my games in osx compatible formats, I'll just be glad to do certain things that make it less of an emulator but more of a vitual machine. cheers to parallels and to hopefully x3 on the mac!
 
Virtual PC will still be on sale

Microsoft is only saying they will not create a universal binary of virtual PC for Intel Macs...they did not say they were killing off Virtual PC for OS X. VPC will still be available for sale for PPC users and supported.

Wow. I'm amazed how people distort the facts.

Don't get me wrong, i've got bot PPC Macs and an Intel MacBook Pro. Have beta tested all the versions and purchased the final version of Parallels. I like Parallels and am happy with it. Much faster on an Intel Mac than VPC on a PPC Mac.

There is no surprise here that MS will not create an Intel Mac version of VPC. VPC emulated the PC CPU...this isn't necessary on Intel Macs, thus it would have to write a completely new program. Everyone knows the MS bought Connectix for its virtual server technology...not VPC for the Mac.

Let's all try to keep the facts straight here and not sensationalize things.
 
Virtual PC will still be on sale

Microsoft is only saying they will not create a universal binary of virtual PC for Intel Macs...they did not say they were killing off Virtual PC for OS X. VPC will still be available for sale for PPC users and supported.

Wow. I'm amazed how people distort the facts.

Don't get me wrong, i've got bot PPC Macs and an Intel MacBook Pro. Have beta tested all the versions and purchased the final version of Parallels. I like Parallels and am happy with it. Much faster on an Intel Mac than VPC on a PPC Mac.

There is no surprise here that MS will not create an Intel Mac version of VPC. VPC emulated the PC CPU...this isn't necessary on Intel Macs, thus it would have to write a completely new program. Everyone knows the MS bought Connectix for its virtual server technology...not VPC for the Mac.

Let's all try to keep the facts straight here and not sensationalize things.
 
Nice but I'd still run it under BC. Not matter what "magic" they pull out of their hat native support will always garner the best FPS and overall speed. That being said I'm really enjoying Parallels. I never knew they did USB support. With that 98% of what I want to do under BC has been migrated over to Parallels with the remaining 2% being Civ IV, Black & White 2, and now Prey. Its a pitty though that Parallels can't use the native NTFS partition. Space is getting REALLY tight now that I have a Parallels HD file and a BC partition. :(

3GB of free space left on OS X is not good. Where is that 160GB 7200RPM drive when you need it. :(
 
PubGuy said:
Microsoft is only saying they will not create a universal binary of virtual PC for Intel Macs...they did not say they were killing off Virtual PC for OS X. VPC will still be available for sale for PPC users and supported.
Click to expand...

:rolleyes:

Yes because there is going to be a major upsurge in PPC sales this holiday season. Make no mistake about it they have killed off support for the Mac platform. Heck how much you wanna bet that VPC won't run in Leopard and that Microsoft isn't going to lift a finger to make it work. Microsoft will probably continue to sell VPC but considering they are handing it out for FREE to people on the PC platform it should be sending up warning flares that MS isn't trying to make tons of money off VPC. They purchased VPC because they are trying to get into the server virtualization market. They couldn't care less about the desktop.
 
Bootcamp

Xacto said:
If you run games with Bootcamp, will it take advantage of the 3D card?
Click to expand...

Xacto, Bootcamp is a process to allow a dual boot into the Windows operating system.

Once you have booted into Windows, you are completely in Windows, no emulation, no translation, etc...

So, if Windows can access the 3D card then yes, you can take advantage of the 3D card.

There seems to be a lot of confusion as to what Bootcamp is about.
 
teme said:
No offence, but $2500 Mac Pro with low-end GPU is not for gamers/consumers.
Click to expand...

X1900 is a low end GPU? You clearly dont play high end games which require some serious hardware. Unless I can crank up all the detail levels to their maximum settings in game, my rig is not up to par.

And if you suggest that there are cheaper options available...

(cant remember who originally quoted the following)

Apple:

Dual 2.66 (2 cpus)
2GB RAM
250GB HD
Superdrive
Quadro FX 4500 512MB
Price: $4,449.00

Alienware:

Dual 2.66 (2 cpus)
2GB RAM
250GB drive
Superdrive
Quadro FX 3500 256MB
Price: $6,041.00

Dell:

2.66 dual core xeon (2 cpus)
2GB RAM
Quadro fx 4500
Superdrive
250GB drive
Price: $5300.00

So whats your problem with the price of the Mac Pro?
 
WildPalms said:
X1900 is a low end GPU? You clearly dont play high end games which require some serious hardware. Unless I can crank up all the detail levels to their maximum settings in game, my rig is not up to par.
Click to expand...

I thought the same thing. Looks like a gaming machine to me. What's wrong with FX4500 or X1900? MacPro = "True game machine". Finally Apple is in the game.
 
Zadillo said:
Wait, why are you including Maya? You can run that natively on OS X, right? Did you mean 3dsMax?

-Zadillo
Click to expand...
Try running (the PPC-only) Maya on a Intel Mac. I've been told (on many occasions) that it just doesn't work. And even if it did work, it would be terribly slow with Rosetta, so you would be better off running it in windows anyway.
 
Zadillo said:
Wait, why are you including Maya? You can run that natively on OS X, right? Did you mean 3dsMax?

-Zadillo
Click to expand...

Trouble is, Maya is NOT a Universal Binary, and you wouldn't want to run it under Rosetta.

Further trouble, Autodesk (when I spoke to them the other day) refused to say if they were working on a UB of Maya. 'It's something we're looking at' was all she would say. Given that Maya is written using XCode, porting should be a no-brainer. Other 3D apps (Cheetah, Cinema4D, Modo) had versions out very quickly.

So Maya to be the first victim of Boot Camp?

Still, great news if Parallels can do this properly.
 
AlexK said:
Actually I posted several days ago about the actual possibility of running professional 3D applications under Parallels workstation. I also made a screencast of messiah (a professional character animation software based on openGL) running together with several quicktimes, iMovieHD, iSight capturing and Exposé showing all windows. Unfortunately I had to change the video again, because of license issues (I also showed a beta product running by accident). But it still shows a lot of the above.

Check it out:
http://www.babylondreams.de/wordpress/index.php/2006/07/29/behold-i-give-you-messiah-for-mac-os-x/
and
http://www.babylondreams.de/wordpress/index.php/2006/07/29/messiah-on-mac-os-x-moving-proof/
Click to expand...

Wow AlexK, that's great! Now if only Apple would release Merom MacBook Pro's and I'm all set for the new academic year :D
 
spetznatz said:
Trouble is, Maya is NOT a Universal Binary, and you wouldn't want to run it under Rosetta.

Further trouble, Autodesk (when I spoke to them the other day) refused to say if they were working on a UB of Maya. 'It's something we're looking at' was all she would say. [...]
Click to expand...
Exactly. And we all know how committed Autodesk is to the Mac platform :mad:

By the way, some months before Apple announced the Intel switch, Autodesk asked users if they were interested in a Mac OS X version of their AutoCAD software. I replied that I would die for one, just because my university (TU Delft, Faculty of Architecture) uses it on all their workstations. I got a reply they received my mail, but never heard from them since.

And some people think Quark is a lazy company, using their flagship software as a sucked dry milk cow. At least Quark supports Mac and Windows...
 
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