I just downloaded the demo version of Parallels Desktop ( http://www.parallels.com/ ) and my immediate impression is “-WOW-, this is very cool”.
Installation was super easy and I’m booting from a “stripped down” version of Windows XP Pro (less than 300 MB) and most things are fairly zippy. The website says that it doesn’t support 3D graphics, but as the attached screenshots prove, that “ain’t exactly the case”!
First thing I tried to install, Ultimate Unwrap 3D ( http://www.unwrap3D.cm/ ) worked like a charm! Seems just as fast as it is on my old PC, so if it’s running slower than native mode I’ll never know
Next I tried that new terrain creation tool, “Earth Sculptor” and it runs, but it’s pretty slow. I’ve got a ton of PC based utilities I’m dying to try and would make my life on a Mac so much easier.
Incidently, with a simple key combination, you can flip your PC window to full screen. Ultimate Unwrap 3D runs fine in full screen but Earth Sculptor is pretty sluggish. From what I’ve seen, I don’t think you’ll want to run any AAA 3D games on Parallels yet, but simple (but useful) OpenGL utilities seem to work fine.
I think they mean 3D hardware acceleration is not supported. The same was true of Virtual PC emulating x86 on PowerPC… and that didn’t stop me from running Windows on a G3 to make maps for Descent 3. Even with textures turned on, software rendering was surprisingly usable.
I wonder how Maya would run, probably slower than through rosetta. I just hope its usable in some way, now I just got to wait 15 days for my Mac Pro. Jeff
I wanted to change the icon for a Windows game I created in Unity, so I tried installing the demo version of “Microangelo” ( http://www.microangelo.us/ ) on my iMac. Ran like a champ using Parallels Desktop.
I’ve had so much good luck with Parallels that I decided to push it and try running the game also. Son-of-a-gun, it ran! It ran slow as heck, had some graphics issues (the screen text color was inverse), but there it was, a Windows version of my Unity game playing on my iMac.
