VMware games

[R.Youden]

I have been getting tired of using Bootcamp on my MacPro so I decided to give VmWare Fusion a go. Mainly I use Bootcamp for development of FPGA code but I also like the odd game and after reeding a few website the new version of VmWare does support some gaming. Anyway this is what I have tried:

GTA Vice City: Installs and loads but the game play is terrible with streaky lines and deformed graphics.

Pro Evolution Soccer 6: Installs fine but it says the CD is not genuine!

World Snooker 2003: Installs but the response time of the menus is so slow I never even got into a game scenario!

In the next few months I will be upping the RAM in my Mac Pro from 1GB to at least 3GB but I am not sure how much of a difference this will make. Anyone else had any success?

Thanks.

 

[tersono]

Oddly, whilst I've found that VMWare offers better performance for regular applications (and is my preferred way of running Windows apps within OS X), the handful of rather elderly games I've tried all seem to run more smoothly (better frame rates) in Parallels. Of course, YMMV...

 

[R.Youden]

Oddly, whilst I've found that VMWare offers better performance for regular applications (and is my preferred way of running Windows apps within OS X), the handful of rather elderly games I've tried all seem to run more smoothly (better frame rates) in Parallels. Of course, YMMV...

Thats what appears to be happening. They are showing off their 3D accelerators, but they don't appear to be that good, which is a shame really as I think VmWare is far more stable than Parallels in general.

 

[tersono]

Yep - agreed.

For what it's worth, extra RAM is well worth having, as Windows benefits from having over 512mb - especially for games and other high-powered apps. Whether using VMWare or Parallels, I find the best performance comes with running from a BootCamp partition and allocating around 1gb RAM to the virtual machine (if you try to run Vista, more might be worthwhile).

FWIW I'm running a 17" MacBook Pro at home & we have a mixture of iMacs and Mac Pros at work - all configured with 4gb RAM, which seems to be the sweet spot at present.

 

[VforVelveta]

I've used Fusion before to run Dawn of War and its, for the most part, playable. The biggest problem I noticed was that everything seemed to run slower. Not lower framerates or anything, but for instance having a squad run to a point just takes longer than it does running it via Bootcamp. I actually played it in Fusion long enough that when I finally did go back to Bootcamp I was amazed at how fast everyone was running around. But yeah, graphically, everything ran smoothly.

 

[coolbits]

This is because virtualization software actualy virtualizes hardware...

Windows over vmware uses graphic card from vmware... not directly your graphics card and only some basic 3D functions are supported...

but over bootcmap there is no virtualization in between and it works directly on hardware... thats why its faster in bootcamp and always will be

 

[R.Youden]

This is because virtualization software actualy virtualizes hardware...

Windows over vmware uses graphic card from vmware... not directly your graphics card and only some basic 3D functions are supported...

but over bootcmap there is no virtualization in between and it works directly on hardware... thats why its faster in bootcamp and always will be

I understand that it will never be as effective as running under Bootcamp but they made a big thing of the 3D games support and of the three that I have tried (and none of them particularly taxing games) not one has worked!