Virtual PC

Hi,
I am looking to buy my first mac(up untill this week i was a wintel), most likely a powermac G5, 2.7 ghz, with 3 gb ram (512 preinstallled, the rest bought elsewhere). I would appreciate any information on the VPC. I have heard many, many diverse things. One question I have is that if I do get the above mentioned mac, would I be able to run games like Half Life 2 on VPC? A ton of people said no, and an equal ammount said yes. Pleas ehelp me, because I am torn between getting a nother windows, or getting a mac with the VPC (if the games work with it). Please HElp!!!!
thnx

No you can not. Virtual PC doesn't support 3D rendering so it would be impossible to play those games at an acceptable level

well, are they coming out with vpc that has 3d rendering?

No. Virtual PC has to convert every single instruction from Intel x86 to PowerPC code, which is no easy task, especially as they don't even read numbers in the same direction. There'd be a significant performance hit.

The only '3d' enabled emulators were earlier versions of RealPC/SoftWindows and Virtual PC that had 3dfx Voodoo emulation, as well as support for the real Voodoo card in the Mac if one existed.

Half Life 2 on 3dfx or a 4meg Voodoo emulation? Erk. :flower:

Simple advice, don't buy a Mac if you will need to rely on Virtual PC significantly. I think you'd find very quickly the Mac will do all your non gaming needs easily and much better than a Windows PC. Games, well the ones that exist for the Mac would be pretty sweet on that setup, plus Windows emulation (ie: serious stuff) via VPC 7 would work fine on such a system.

But if you want to play games that are only on the PC, you need a PC. My advice is perhaps, why not perhaps go for a lower end PowerMac G5, say a Dual 2 or Dual 2.3; and with the money you save build a cheap PC gaming box which you'd otherwise have spent on the Dual 2.7. Then you get a kick butt Macintosh plus a decent PC to play your games.

No point pulling the wool over your eyes though, Mac games will run fine on such a setup but emulation is not the way to go for playing PC games.

Vicky

when macs move to intel, will the 3d rendering for vpc be possible?

Probably not, as when intel macs appears you'll be able to install windows on them, or use a vmware type product to directly run .exe apps from os x.

So then you'll be able to play all your regular windows games on your mac AND still have OS X.

wow, so kool so vpc is completely eliminated.

I, tried VPC but it was to slow on a 2.0 Ghz G5 with 1GB Ram, SO I stopped using it, Big Money Waste for ME