PC Gaming: Bootcamp vs. Parallels vs. VMWare Fusion

Hey guys,
First time Mac owner in just 5 days. Excited!
I'm currently on a Windows 7 laptop, but with my MBP coming, I'd like to move 100% to the MBP. I'm still a PC gamer though, so I was wondering if anyone had any experience running older games on Bootcamp/Parallels/VMWare Fusion.
Generally, I still play old stuff like Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance, MVP Baseball 2005, NBA Live 06, Madden 07, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Need for Speed, Red Faction, Max Payne 2, etc.
My specs are as follows: 2.0GHz quad-core, Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM @ 1333MHz, 500GB hard drive @ 5400-rpm, Intel HD Graphics 3000, AMD Radeon HD 6490M with 256MB GDDR5.
I'd like to try and avoid Bootcamp if possible, just because I'm not big on having to reboot to jump from OSX to a game. Would Parallels/Fusion be able to run these smoothly? After reading some of the forum posts, some people are struggling a bit running both operating systems, but 8 GB of RAM should be enough to handle both, no? Is it possible for the RAM to die/burn out from being overused by multitasking like this?
Thanks,
Marc

Bootcamp is the easiest and best performing way to play windows games. When Running Parrallels or VMware... you are using virtulization software and cannot utilize the true performance of the machine. BOOTCAMP will be your best method of running demanding games that are made for WINDOWS.
However, as an alternative you could try using wineskins or steam. Wineskin will allow you to run windows games on your mac. Anyway, booting into windows is not all that bad it takes maybe 1 minute. You won't burn out your ram, but I don't think virtulization should be used to play games because you just won't get the performance you need to run graphically intensive games.
SO JUST INSTALL WINDOWS USING BOOTCAMP and your machine will operate like a PC and have better performance than the virtulization software.

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Bootcamp partition restriction with vmware fusion

I have a 2 TB hard drive on my iMac that I was going to use to install windows. Using bootcamp, all went well. I put Vmware Fusion on and it worked well. Later I thought it might be nice to have 2 partitions on this hard drive so I re-partitioned the hard drive (not using bootcamp) and then installed windows, again no problem. The problem occurs when I then put on Vmware Fusion. Seems that program is very sensitive to the bootcamp created partition and to use any other program causes Vmware Fusion to fail. Doing some research, I thought I read that bootcamp will ONLY create one partition, no option for two partitions. My question is: Am I reading this correctly? Can bootcamp only make one partition? Is there a hack around this? I hate having a 2 TB hard drive with only one partition.

Hi again,
Boot Camp is a (very limited) utility for creating a non-mac partition on a Mac volume (by Apple). That's why it'll allow to create only 1 partition on a Mac OS hard drive.
This has to be on the HD where there is Mac OS X already - so you can't use BootCamp on your 2nd HD.
If you install 2nd macOS on the 2TB HD, start from there & then partition it with BC, then you should be able to start a bootcamped windows from there.
VMware doesn't have to be used with the help of BootCamp - I have both Parallels & VMware installed without the BootCamp.
As a matter of fact you can install Parallels & VMware from an .iso image (which you can't use with BC) - but Windows has to be installed the same way as with BS = it will take ± 1hour to install.
Also - you can store the resulting 'file' (which in my case I'm storing on my external 'My Book' 2TB hard drive) on any HD which is connected to your iMac.
The 'file' is stored as 'Windows 7.vmwarevm' - my is 13Gb actual size but with-in the win7 I have on it the size is = 40Gb {Local Disc (C:)}.
All these 'Virtual Machines' are automatically compressed by the VMware application.

Bootcamp with win7 and vmware fusion...togheter

Is it possible?
I need a partition with bootcamp installed and also a virtual win7 in order to not reboot everytime i need to use windows.
Sorry for my english.
Thank U.

Of course. Also, VMware Fusion allows you to virtualize your Boot Camp partition, so you don't have to install Windows 7 twice.
Your computer only supports 64-bit Windows 7 and 8 versions, so install Windows 7 by following Apple's steps > http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/boot_camp_install-setup_10.8.pdf You should download the Windows support software from Boot Camp Assistant or from the Apple site, so you can install it after finishing the Windows installation.
Then, start up in OS X (hold the Alt key while your computer is starting, and choose Macintosh HD), open VMware Fusion and the Boot Camp partition will appear. Start it up and you will be able to use OS X and Windows at the same time

Parallels vs VMware Fusion

I am new to Apple and have an Intel iMac. I have been looking at adding windows as I have a Windows Laptop and my Daughters both have Windows systems. I have been reading reviews on the Parallels software and it seems to be many many negative reviews than positive ones. VMware Fusion on the other hand seems to have more positive reviews. I have heard and been advised the Parallels software is the way to go. Can some body please help me out and provide some advise.
Thanks
Michael D. Scott
[email protected]

michaeld53 wrote:
I am new to Apple and have an Intel iMac. I have been looking at adding windows as I have a Windows Laptop and my Daughters both have Windows systems. I have been reading reviews on the Parallels software and it seems to be many many negative reviews than positive ones. VMware Fusion on the other hand seems to have more positive reviews. I have heard and been advised the Parallels software is the way to go. Can some body please help me out and provide some advise.
I wish I could help you out, but I don't understand it any more than you do.
I can tell you that this trend has continued unchanged since before VMWare Fusion was even released. I even got suckered into it and bought a copy of VMWare Fusion. I tried it and found it made my Mac unstable even when Fusion wasn't running. I went back to Parallels (maybe a year ago?) and have had no problems. I never had problems with Parallels to begin with. I'm just slow to upgrade and people said Parallels 3.0 was a disaster. It wasn't. It runs great. Now people say 4.0 is a disaster. I don't know. I'm slow to upgrade so I'm just now getting around to installing Parallels 4.0.
I have not seen a single bit of anti-Parallels venom supported by fact - not even once.

Parallels vs VMWare fusion 5

Recommendations please. Windows version 7 or 8 with Parallels 8 or VMWare Desktop 8??
Thank you.

mrbob1928 wrote:
Recommendations please. Windows version 7 or 8 with Parallels 8 or VMWare Desktop 8??
Thank you.
It's really all up to you. I got Parallels v3 as a part of a bundle deal when I bought my first MacBook Pro, and I have gotten upgrade discounts on it since to keep me current. I got VMWare Fusion through a cross platform or competitive upgrade program when I bought it back in the v2 time frame. I have always tended towards Parallels for speed reasons, but both seem to work.
One thing to keep in mind is that I am only running 32 bit Windows systems in my virtual environments. I use one for Work support purposes, so nothing but work is run there, and for my personal things that still need Windows, I don't need 64 bit, so I still use a 32 bit install there too. The only problem I ever had with Parallels was when I was running it on a Boot Camp partition that also had an HFS+ driver loaded for Boot Camp. In that situation, it would hang during shutdown if run as a virtual machine.

Should I get parallels or vmware fusion

Im using bootcamp right now to play xp (might get 7 soon). bootcamp is great but I dont like restarting my computer. I tried the trial version of vmware and parallels but they both seem real slow. If I get the full version of these programs will they be better? Right now I mainly play Call of duty Modren Warfare 2, Unreal, and modeling in maya. These are the main things I dont want to lose when i buy this program.

Hi mylegs,
as for playing Windows games and specifically newer games, nothing can beat BootCamp speedwise due to it using the Mac hardware natively.
Parallels and Fusion use virtualized hardware through a hardware abstraction layer and therefor always will be slower.
Especially with software like games and 3D rendering, that rely on having native access to the computers hardware.
For the typical "Office-like" programs (word processing, spreadsheet, etc.) Paralles and Fusion are indeed more suitable, since they run alongside OSX.
So my advise is, stick with BootCamp for the useage you have.
Regards
Stefan

Which is better (Boot Camp) or (Parallel / VMware Fusion)???

Hi guys,
I want to install Windows along OS X...
now what is better?
to install Windows via Boot Camp or via Parallel / VMware fusion??
and if through one of the virtual machine softwares, which is BETTER?? the Parallel for Desktop or the VMware fusion one???
Thank you

Guitarcal wrote:
I use both boot camp and vmware fusion. A neat feature of vmware fusion is you can access your boot camp partition as a virtual machine from vmware. This way, you can have both. I believe parallels might also let you do that but I have never used it. This has been helpful to me if I need to access a file from the boot camp partition quickly and easily without rebooting my computer.
I agree with dwb that xp is probably going to be the best os to run through a virtualization software.
I honestly don't think you can go wrong with either parallels or vmware fusion. There is also a FREE software package created by sun called VirtualBox.
Here is the link to there home page: http://www.virtualbox.org/
I hear and read that it is excellent as well.
Hope this helps.
I just installed parallels and you can use your bootcamp partition for the vm with parallels as well. Its pretty slick. Use it for light applications with parallel, reboot to bootcamp for graphics intensive ones.
Cheers.

If i buy VMware fusion or Parallels desktop, i need a version of windows?

do i need windows with parallels or VMware?
a lot of thanks

nicholasfromcorreggio wrote:
do i need windows with parallels or VMware?
a lot of thanks
You don't need Windows if you want to run a different OS as your "guest". You can download many different flavors of Linux for free, and most of them will run in Parallels or VMWare Fusion... If you want to run Windows though, you will need a copy of that OS to install in the virtual machine of your choice...

Bootcamp or Parallels for windows games?

I only use Bootcamp generally to play windows games on my Mac. It is a pain to have to constantly reboot each time to play the game and then switch back to my Mac side and vice versa. I just learned about Parallels for mac. Is it worth it to change to this system to avoid the rebooting? Basically the most important concern: Will the games run as well using Parallels as they do on the Bootcamp only version?
Thanx for any help?

Hi,
Parallels (and VMWare Fusion, too) have only support for DirectX 8.1 with experimental (limited) support for DirectX 9.
Since almost all newer games rely on at least DX9 and DX10, if the hardware supports it, these games simply won't run in Parallels/Fusion.
Nonetheless Parallels/Fusion are great applications for running Windows alongside OSX, but they are not very suitable for gaming in Windows.
Stefan

Bootcamp to Parallels/VMware Fusion

Hi,
A couple months ago I partitioned my harddrive in half and installed windows 7 through bootcamp. I now no longer like that I have to restart my computer to switch to windows, and I would like to use a virtual machine client.
Has anyone made this switch? I am unsure about what I should do about my partitioned harddrive.
Can parallel or VMware use my partitioned harddrive so I can avoid going through the hassle of unpartitioning the drive?
Is it a hassle to unpartition
Thank you!

Yes Parallels and Fusion can use your Boot Camp installed Windows as their guest operating system. How to do this is fully described on the Parallels and Fusion sites.

VMware Fusion Performance: Bootcamp Partition or Virtual Machine?

I'd like to run ArcGIS 9.3 in Windows XP using VMware Fusion. Can anyone comment on the virtues/drawbacks of using a bootcamp partition versus creating a VMware "Virtual Machine"?
With bootcamp partition I can gradually increase the size of the partition as the partition becomes full using Drive Genius, correct?
What about performance?
Thanks!

Visit MacTech.com and read their two benchmark reviews of Parallels, VM Fusion, and Boot Camp.
You cannot "gradually increase the size" of a Boot Camp partition. To change the size you must first delete the existing partition then create a new, larger partition. Doing so will delete the entire Windows system, so be sure to back it up beforehand.

VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop Benchmark Comparison

This is a quickie benchmark of VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop using Super PI, PC Mark 05, and Passmark.
VMWare Fusion 36932
Parallels Desktop 3094 Beta 2
Notes:
Both virtual machines were allocated with large 10+ GB virtual disks and 640MB of RAM. The VMWare CPU was configured with two processors. The Parallels CPU was configured with 1 (two is not available). VMWare reported the CPU as 1 physical, 2 logical processors running at 2.66 GHz while Parallels reported 1 physical, 1 logical processor running at 9.6 GHz (the combined speed of all four cores on the Mac Pro). The max observed CPU utilization in activity monitor when running under VMWare was 200% and max under Parallels was 173%.
I chose not to compare 1 VMWare CPU vs. 1 Parallels CPU. While Parallels does not support SMP or multithreaded processes on multiple processors the CPU utilization on the Mac went well above 1 core (173%). For this comparison, I wanted to see results of max processing based on what the two vendors have delivered, as opposed to benchmarking the underlying "virtual or hypervisor cpu" on a 1:1 basis. This explains why VMWare was 2x faster than Parallels on some CPU tests.
Both of these products are beta. VMWare is running in debug mode (can not be turned off in this beta).
Caveat emptor on these stats. This was an unscientific exercise to satisfy my curiosity. Some of the extraordinary differences are highlighted with <--.
Platform:
Mac Pro 2.66 GHz, 2GB RAM, Nvidia 7300GT
Disk 1 - OS X, 73GB Raptor
Disk 2 - dedicated disk where each virtual machine image was created separate from the OS or any OS-related virtual memory files.
VMWare and Parallels guest OS: Windows XP Professional, SP 2
Comparison Benchmrk
VMWare Fusion 36932 and Parallels Desktop 3094 Beta 2
Super PI Parallels VMWare
512K 8s 9s
1M 20s 21s
4M 1m 57s 2m 03s
PC Mark 05 Parallels VMWare
CPU Test Suite N/A N/A
Memory Test Suite N/A N/A
Graphics Test Suite N/A N/A
HDD Test Suite N/A N/A
HDD - XP Startup 5.0 MB/s 19.54 MB/s <--
Physics and 3D Test failed Test failed
Transparent Windows Test failed 69.99 Windows/s
3D - Pixel Shader Test failed Test failed
Web Page Rendering 3.58 Pages/s 2.34 Pages/s
File Decrypt 71.73 MB/s 67.05 MB/s
Graphics Memory - 64 Lines 179.92 FPS 111.73 FPS
HDD - General Usage 4.82 MB/s 42.01 MB/s <--
Multithread Test 1 / Audio Comp N/A N/A
Multithread Test 1 / Video Encoding Test failed Test failed
Multithread Test 2 / Text Edit 152.85 Pages/s 138.48 Pages/s
Multithread Test 2 / Image DeComp 5.91 MPixels/s 35.4 MPixels/s <--
Multithread Test 3 / File Comp 3.22 MB/s 6.03 MB/s
Multithread Test 3 / File Encrypt 19.0 MB/s 33.26 MB/s <--
Multithread Test 3 / HDD - Virus Scan 27.91 MB/s 25.49 MB/s
Multithread Test 3 / Mem Lat - Rnd 16MB 5.34 MAcc/s 6.63 MAcc/s
File Comp N/A N/A
File DeComp N/A N/A
File Encrypt N/A N/A
File Decrypt N/A N/A
Image DeComp N/A N/A
Audio Comp N/A N/A
Multithread Test 1 / File Comp N/A N/A
Multithread Test 1 / File Encrypt N/A N/A
Multithread Test 2 / File DeComp N/A N/A
Multithread Test 2 / File Decrypt N/A N/A
Multithread Test 2 / Audio DeComp N/A N/A
Multithread Test 2 / Image DeComp N/A N/A
Memory Read - 16 MB N/A N/A
Memory Read - 8 MB N/A N/A
Memory Read - 192 kB N/A N/A
Memory Read - 4 kB N/A N/A
Memory Write - 16 MB N/A N/A
Memory Write - 8 MB N/A N/A
Memory Write - 192 kB N/A N/A
Memory Write - 4 kB N/A N/A
Memory Copy - 16 MB N/A N/A
Memory Copy - 8 MB N/A N/A
Memory Copy - 192 kB N/A N/A
Memory Copy - 4 kB N/A N/A
Memory Lat - Rnd 16 MB N/A N/A
Memory Lat - Rnd 8 MB N/A N/A
Memory Lat - Rnd 192 kB N/A N/A
Memory Lat - Rnd 4 kB N/A N/A
Transparent Windows N/A N/A
Graphics Memory - 64 Lines N/A N/A
Graphics Memory - 128 Lines N/A N/A
WMV Video Playback N/A N/A
3D - Fill Rate Multi Texturing N/A N/A
3D - Polygon Throughput Multiple Lights N/A N/A
3D - Pixel Shader N/A N/A
3D - Vertex Shader N/A N/A
HDD - XP Startup N/A N/A
HDD - Application Loading N/A N/A
HDD - General Usage N/A N/A
HDD - Virus Scan N/A N/A
HDD - File Write N/A N/A
Processor Intel Core 2 9653 MHz Processor Unknown 2661 MHz
Physical / Logical CPUs "1 Physical, 1 Logical" "1 Physical, 2 Logical"
MultiCore 1 Processor Core Multicore 2 Processor Cores
HyperThreading N/A N/A
Graphics Card Generic VGA Generic VGA
Graphics Driver Parallels Video Driver VMWare SVGA II
Co-operative adapters No No
DirectX Version 9.0c 9.0c
System Memory 640 MB 640MB
Motherboard Manufacturer N/A Intel Corporation
Motherboard Model N/A 440BX Desktop Reference Platform
Operating System Microsoft Windows XP Microsoft Windows XP
Passmark Parallels VMWare
CPU - Integer Math (MOPS) 112.35 230.31 <--
CPU - Floating Point Math (MOPS) 280.46 588.33 <--
CPU - Find Prime Numbers (OPS) 446.37 676.99 <--
CPU - SSE/3DNow! (MMPS) 2118.56 4737.13 <--
CPU - Comp (KB/s) 2994.16 5952.34 <--
CPU - Encrypt (MB/s) 18.09 36.27 <--
CPU - Image Rotation (IRPS) 598.21 1184.41 <--
CPU - String Sorting (TPS) 2118.81 3672.59 <--
Graphics 2D - Lines (TPS) 220.71 25.15 <--
Graphics 2D - Rectangles (TPS) 189.74 61.8 <--
Graphics 2D - Shapes (TPS) 39.54 13.71 <--
Graphics 2D - Fonts and Text (OPS) 190.39 75.88 <--
Graphics 2D - GUI (OPS) 439.77 63.72 <--
Memory - Allocate Small Block (MB/s) 2533.83 2526.21
Memory - Read Cached (MB/s) 1960.5 1906.27
Memory - Read Uncached (MB/s) 1871.79 1826.08
Memory - Write (MB/s) 1687.81 1545.43
Memory - Large RAM (OPS) 60.99 46.37
Disk - Sequential Read (MB/s) 102.11 76.45 <--
Disk - Sequential Write (MB/s) 58.33 50.9
Disk - Rnd Seek + RW (MB/s) 51.4 40.4
CPU Mark 711.08 1432.72 <--
2D Graphics Mark 743.31 176.5 <--
Memory Mark 599.94 580.38
Disk Mark 766.11 606.7
PassMark Rating 557.27 637.35<br>

Thanks for posting these numbers - it's an interesting comparison.
I would expect the final VMWare fusion performance numbers to be quite a bit better than that of Parallels - they have almost a decade's worth of experience more than the Parallels folks in this arena, and a much larger development team to boot.
Once VMWare Fusion is released to the public, I think that you'll see a clearer distinction between the two products. VMWare will continue to appeal to the professional customer, with a more robust feature set and corporate-friendly features (and a correspondingly higher price tag); Parallels will fall more into the consumer/VirtualPC-replacement market. It will be interesting to see how Parallels will be affected when (and if) VMWare player is ported to OS X.
Interesting about the Parallels performance stats on a native partition - looks like almost enough reason to avoid the bootcamp partition approach altogether. Sharing a native windows installation with a VM in parallels is a pretty scary situation in any case, as the two environments have entirely different hardware configurations. Do-able, but there is some black magic involved (if you want to see an example of what I mean, try to move a windows installation from one machine to another w/different hardware sometime - it ain't pretty); I wouldn't try this in a production scheme unless I had REALLY good backups.

Using Pro/E on a Mac using VMWare Fusion or BootCamp

Hi
I have a MacBook Pro:
Processor:2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory: 4 GB 1067 Mhz DDR3
And recently for uni I have had to find a way to get Pro Engineer, a CAD program, running on my Mac. My solution was to buy VMWare Fusion and instal Windows 7 on my Mac so I could then run the CAD program. Once I got that done windows was running well however once I got Pro Engineer installed it was incredibly slow and pretty much unusable.
My question is has anyone got any experience with running this program on a similar machine and can help me solve this problem so I can run the program? Should I use bootcamp instead of VMWare? Would it make a difference?
Thanks

Yes, I would definitely recommend setting up BootCamp for this - it's relatively painless. (It can create a new partition in the unused space on your OS X disk without erasing the disk.) The BootCamp Assistant has detailed instructions on how to go about setting up a partition and installing Windows on it, but the gist of it is that you have the BootCamp Assistant create a partition for you, then you boot from your Windows install disc and install Windows on that partition. When you've booted into Windows for the first time, pop in your OS 10.6 install disc, and it will install Apple's hardware drivers and utilities for Windows. If you got 10.6 shortly after it came out, the drivers will be version 3.0 for Windows Vista - you'll need to download version BootCamp 3.1 from the Apple support site to ensure full support for Windows 7. (If you have a newer copy of 10.6, it might have the new drivers already - I don't know, as I have an older one.)
I would, however, also recommend keeping VMWare Fusion (assuming you've already paid for it). Once Windows is set up in BootCamp, you can go into Fusion and create a virtual machine that's mapped to it (so you can also use your BootCamp installation as a virtual machine in your Mac if you don't need the full performance of booting into it natively). It should be fairly obvious how to do that - it will probably prompt you automatically. The virtualization also allows for as many different machines with as many OS's as you want - I'm running every version of Windows I've ever had in Parallels, plus a number of free OS's I'm trying out (BSD, Linux, Solaris). In short, it's a good thing to have.

Which is better? VMware Fusion 3 or Parallels Desktop 6?

Hi all
I have had my iMac i5 for 3 days now and I am starting to get the hang of it ater coverting from PeeCee....
But I have some application that I need to run in windows, mainly my pinnacle software (dazzle creator 90 and media streamer similar to apple TV).
I would like to access and run windows via the mac os but I am stuck on which software to buy. Should I et VMware Fusion 3 or Parallels Desktop 6.
I would use bootcamp but from what I have read I can only run OSx or Windows XP
Does anyone here use either software and recommend which is best or if there is another similar software? I am thinking of selling the streamer to get apple tv but only if I can't get this to work...

Forgot to mention that I have found 2 different versions of parallel's 6
there is:
Parallels Desktop 6 £59.99
and
Parallels Desktop 6 Switch to Mac Edition £79.99
are these the same software?

PC Gaming: Bootcamp vs. Parallels vs. VMWare Fusion

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