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BayouBengal

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 29, 2008
206
0
Houston,TX
I am using Parallels to run Vista Ultimate. The performance rating that Vista is giving me is 1.0 due to 3D capabilities. I have the 2.4Ghz Alu Macbook, I know it's not the most powerful video card in the world but shouldn't it get a higher rating than 1.0? Any tips for squeezing out some performance other than buying more RAM and upping the allocation in Parallels?
 
The 'Video Card' that parallels emulates to the host operating system is a really basic type of card. Also since it is emulated, it clearly isn't as powerful as a native run system.

The emulated video card is the same card no matter the system it is run on (apart from the video memory you can dedicate).
 
The 'Video Card' that parallels emulates to the host operating system is a really basic type of card. Also since it is emulated, it clearly isn't as powerful as a native run system.

The emulated video card is the same card no matter the system it is run on (apart from the video memory you can dedicate).

I knew an emulated card wouldn't be as good as native but I was just surprised at the disparity in the rating. Previously all I'd ever used a virtual machine for was Visual Studio and SQL Server, not exactly graphically intense.

At least in Windows when using Microsoft Virtual PC it is recommended you run the virtual machine from an external drive to optimize performance. If any of this valid with Parallels?
 
I knew an emulated card wouldn't be as good as native but I was just surprised at the disparity in the rating. Previously all I'd ever used a virtual machine for was Visual Studio and SQL Server, not exactly graphically intense.

At least in Windows when using Microsoft Virtual PC it is recommended you run the virtual machine from an external drive to optimize performance. If any of this valid with Parallels?

No, running it off an external drive would be worse in performance, not better. Why would you care for Vista's index rating? That rating doesn't do much at all. Its just for show.
 
It is actually recommended by many to run virtual machines from an external drive using USB 2.0 as opposed to running your virtual machine from the same physical disk as your host OS. It has to do with your host and you Virtual Machine competing for the same I/O resources.
 
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