Hardcore gaming in Fusion/Parrallels?

Hi all. I've been exposed to the wonderful world of OSX, and currently own a Mini. Thing is, my entire life all I have done is a lot of hardcore gaming on my custom PCs. Unreal Tournaments, all the Quakes, all the Dooms, etc.

So I've been wondering..exactly how bad of a performance hit would you get from having windoze in a window?

I have Fusion, but can't exactly experiment much with it since mine only has the Intel 950. And we all know how stellar that is for games. The ideal thing for me would be to get a Pro and upgrade my video card as they come along, but the Pro is a wee bit out of my price range.

And honestly, the only thing that is preventing me from fully migrating over to a Mac is that fact that I'm a big gamer. I'm used to upgrading my PC system almost every .5-1yrs. And unless I have a Pro, I see that being a very expensive venture with Apple. I haven't even turned my PC on in a few days since I haven't had a chance to play any games.

I think it would be best for you to get say a iMac, and run windows via boot camp. The fusion and parrallels only have limited 3d support, so attempting to run any game newer than say about 5 years or so will be a very crapped out performance. However if you run it through bootcamp, it would be like a everyday pc just with a pretty screen and an apple logo.

I was under the impression(from the genius people) that you run parallels if you do more application and documents, and that you run bootcamp if you are seriously thinking of gaming. And parallels takes some of your ram which could have been used on the game. If you are a "hardcore gamer", you would go the hardcore route with bootcamp...give parallels the boot

If your a hard core gamer do your self a favor as keep your windows game machine. Mac is a great machine, but they just do not build game machines. The graphics is your big hangup usually. If you want games on a Mac then using boot camp is probably the best you are gonna get even on the biggest fastest Mac because anything else is just emulation which will always suffer in performance.

Some pc games do run fairly well on the Mac but they are few and far between and are not usually the latest greatest games. Game writers do not normally write real high powered games for the Mac. A visit to the Mac game sections will quickly show that fact to be true.

So, until game writers start putting out the "latest & greatest" in Mac format i would say keep your Windows Gamer and get yourself a good Mac for doing everything else with ease. I did...

I agree with the above. I still have my 6-year old Athlon 64 3400+ (single core) to play games. With 2 gigs of RAM, Vista Home Premium and an HD3850, it runs most things with no issues. Left 4 Dead can be maxed out at 1680*1050, even Crysis will run pretty well.

Parallels now allows both cores to run (version 4) but this will not make up for almost no GPU help on modern games. I got Quake II to run in Parallels (the Steam version) at just about full speed, but anything more recent that that will be horrible. My 6 year old PC (for gaming at least) will beat any Mac running Parallels/VM Fusion.

I think even in Bootcamp, you might find Quake 4 or UT2007 will struggle on the GMA950.

If hardcore gaming is your thing, then it would be much cheaper for you in the long run to have a generic-built gaming PC that you can upgrade as needed with stock parts. As you note, the GMA graphics won't do much for you. And if you buy an iMac or Pro with a separate graphics adapter, you can assume that over time the adapter will become obsolete and it will likely (but perhaps not) be more expensive to keep upgrading your Mac just to keep pace with the bleeding edge of PC graphics and games.

If you choose to get a Mac with separate graphics, you really should run your games in Boot Camp. While both Fusion and Parallels do offer some 3D hardware acceleration support, most users who do gaming report substantially better results under Boot Camp.

Good luck!

James said:

If your a hard core gamer do your self a favor as keep your windows game machine. Mac is a great machine, but they just do not build game machines. The graphics is your big hangup usually. If you want games on a Mac then using boot camp is probably the best you are gonna get even on the biggest fastest Mac because anything else is just emulation which will always suffer in performance.

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Agreed. If you are that into gaming, use a PC. There is no point in buying a Mac if you are going to be spending a lot of time in Windows.