Mac or Windows? Neither, actually.
No, I’m not talking about going linux or BSD. I’m talking about the latest version of Parallels.
Yes, I know everyone is getting sick of me talking about my imminent move over to Mac OS X. But I think people may not realise how blurry the lines between my two primary OS have become. Check out this video; the last sentence is why I’m ‘making the change’:
Now, I was going to go down this route before I knew about this feature, don’t get me wrong. But I had reservations. I was going to have to dedicate a lot of time and thinking and square-peg-in-a-round-holing to get windows and apple to play nicely together. Parallels has done it for me. I no longer have to choose. I can have my cake and eat it (after all, that’s what the cake’s for)
It may surprise some of you, but I’m not as stupid as I look. I know that these are promo videos, not impartial reviews. The 3d graphics acceleration feature (embedded below), for instance - is the display that jerky because of youtube, because of the mac hardware, or because the virtualisation takes a hit? I also note that none of these new features are shown running at the same time as coherence.
As far as the 3d acceleration goes, a basic level of usability is more important than being able to run games: licensing considerations means that I’ll be using parallels’ ability to run from a boot camp installation anyway, so if a game doesn’t run satisfactorially (sp?) I can always reboot. More important to be able to run day to day tasks, video overlays and the like. But more data would be nice. How about a benchmark?
Well, it looks a little better. But I’m worried that it won’t even run all the tests for a system (that chris tells me) is out of date and only tests Directx8. There are people out there who say OpenGL is better supported than DX (surprise surprise).
Of course, there are better reviews than YouTube out there: however, it is of limited use since it has been written by mac users (behold the lack of constructive or even relevant criticism of Smart Select). At least it gives some sort of benchmark, which doesn’t bode overly well for games under parallels. Ho hum, see above.
Anyone else want to offer their perspective?