Need help, new college student/Mac user

hello all.

This is one of my first posts, so I hope its in the right forum. (Skip to bottom for questions without details =/ sorry)

Im a soon to be college student (upcoming fall), and my major there will be Simulation and Digital Entertainment.

Basically its game development. I spoke with one of the students and they said that the programs they use are mainly for Windows.

Im not 100% sure of the programs being used, but I know they do use the XNA Game studios, I assume the rest are similar in style.

I started out looking at Windows laptops, but quickly moved to the MBP beings leopard has boot camp with it.

My question being, does anyone do work similar to XNA and game design on the Mac OS??

and is so, does the Boot Camp/VM Ware run those types of programs well.

Thank you for all help in advance.


~Zach

I'm not expert and I just got my first ever mac
but I do use some more specific design programs that are windows base. so long story short I use virtual machine from VMware Fusion with windows xp pro. in it, and it works fine and I like it better than dual boot, its faster to start up and you can have more than one operating system working at the same time, (with some memory sharing)
hope that helps
Jerry

zachryan1,

Welcome to Mac Forums!

I use XP with Parallels, and really like the convenience of having the 2 OSs running side by side, but I don't run the kind of programs you'll be using. BUT, I do know that XP runs faster in Boot Camp than it does in Parallels. Some say it runs at native speeds, others say it runs faster.

So if you need to run programs in Windows, I'd suggest you start out in Boot Camp and see if you like it there. Of course you can alway try a VM like Parallels and see how Windows works there for you and if you don't like it go back to Boot Camp...

So there are options, Noel

I would say it would work fine with VMware Fusion or Parallels if you have plenty of RAM.

DarkKnight369 said:

I would say it would work fine with VMware Fusion or Parallels if you have plenty of RAM.

Click to expand...

I would say they most probably wouldn't.

He's going to be doing game design, which is largely graphics intensive stuff. GPU acceleration is both virtualization packages is flakey at best, so whenever you want to test something you'd probably need to boot into windows.

To be honest you'll probably spend most of your time using your boot camp partition if you're doing that sort of work. So unless you're really set on the hardware and the ability to run OS X, you might be better off with a PC.

I have never used the virtualization, so I guess that could be true. Boot camp would be best to have the dedicated resources, but it probably would still work in either of the 2 mentioned programs, just might be slower.

Thanks for all the help.

I was looking into getting a pretty beefy windows pc, but b/w the weight and Macs now being able to run Windows, I decided to go for a Mac.

I will most likely be using boot camp, but figured, if im in class, wouldn't want to have to shut down, restart, etc.

I will give it all thought, thank you all very much.

~Zach