Win7 thru Parallels: 3D Graphics question

[VeridisQuo]

I am currently using a 2012 Mac Mini with the 2.3Ghz Quad core i7 Ivy bridge. I've been using Parallels 8 to run Win7 on it for some light gaming through it. While the graphics have been surprisingly well through a virtual machine, on a mac mini that only has the HD4000 integrated graphics, I'm curious if (graphics wise) games would run any better on a iMac with its own graphics card?

I'm not very familiar with how Virtual video adapters work within a virtual machine, still pretty new to the virtual machine world, so I have no idea if running it on a machine with dedicated graphics would improve performance at all. I have the opportunity to get a new 2012 iMac, and would only do it if can get better graphics thru the virtual windows. I'm not interested in Bootcamp as I wanna still use OS X and this is my first mac and I'm loving OS X, only wanna use Windows for a few programs and not as a main machine anymore.

Basically what I'm asking is, does the host graphics make any sort of difference to the virtual machine's graphics? If I do upgrade to an iMac, I plan on getting a 2012 one with the i7. Thanks for any info!

SIDENOTE: I have played around with different VM settings, even upping it to 6cores, 8GB RAM and 1GB video memory, with no real improvements.

 

[iMacDragon]

Yes, it would make a difference.

The virtual graphics card translates the VM's graphics calls into OpenGL calls on the host, so it's directly effected by how fast the host can process OpenGL.

 

[VeridisQuo]

In that case, do you think going from the 2.3ghz i7 with 8 virtual cores integrated graphics to the 2.7 i5 in the base iMac with the GT640M, would effect performance since I would only have 4 cores to use?

When testing, giving the VM 2 cores, 4, or even 6, there was no performance difference. Had the same FPS in all 3 tests, even less FPS when I tried anything with Win8. I assume I shouldn't worry about giving the VM 2 cores on the i5 with the much better dedicated graphics? May not be able to get the i7 since I'll have to get 16GB built in, as I don't wanna tear that thing completly apart just to upgrade the RAM with 16GB I already have, but I may go for the base 27", since I can upgrade its RAM, but only with the i5 processor.

 

[iMacDragon]

I wouldn't have thought the extra hyperthreaded cores would make much difference to that sort of use, mostly things like video encoding that benefit a lot from them.

 

[VeridisQuo]

Thats what I was thinking.