Adios Boot Camp, Aloha Parallels 3.0
Ready to play Quake 4 and Half-Life 2 on your Mac without rebooting? You'll finally be able to in just a few weeks with Parallels 3.0, the world's first OS-emulator to offer full OpenGL and DirectX support.
I know what you're thinking. Emulators are to games as fuel lines to rubber cement, right? Fair enough, but while Virtual PC suffers hard drive hysterics anytime you load much beyond Notepad, Parallels 2.x already does a pretty bang-up job with basic 2D games. I've been running SSG's Battles in Normandy without hiccups or hitches for the last two months, and Introversion's recently released DEFCON--no visual slouch--barely misses a beat.
No word on Vista Aero support yet, a question asked by at least one commenter at Ben Rudolph's blog entry detailing hands-on time with the beta. Also, Rudolph verifies Quake 4 runs, but makes amibiguous reference to how well. He says it works "full-speed," which could really mean anything, and the screen capture (see above) shows the game in a low-res window; I imagine things slow considerably if you're going all out full-screen sans interpolation.
The only thing that could possibly make this better would be the inclusion in Apple's rumored imminent Macbook Pro refresh of a beefier mobile GPU, say Nvidia's Go 7950 GTX (or better yet, one of the recently announced DX10-compatible 8M series chips). I do everything short of Vista gaming on my Macbook Pro, and while ATI's Mobility Radeon x1600 is certainly a formidable portable GPU, it's been struggling lately with mid-range games like Civilization 4. Besides, does anyone really enjoy playing games with detail set all the way down to "amorphous blob-'o-color" levels?
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Yes, but will Parallels 3.0 support more than one core and/or (more importantly) more than 512mb RAM? That is a current limitation that keeps me going back to bootcamp. Baesides, what good are all the cool 3D games if I can't use more than 512mb of RAM?