Using VMWare Fusion for playing games

Yep - you're too optimistic! LOL

I have a Dual Quad 2.8GHz Intel Xeon Mac Pro with an Nvidia GeForce 8800GT. My GPU is FAST. The system has 10 (that's TEN) GB of RAM.

Even with an octo-core machine and all that video and system RAM Crysis only plays "pretty good" on High Settings.

Fusion isn't meant to play 3D games through. You'll have a LOT better luck with games on that machine if you just create a small Boot Camp partition and boot directly in to Windows. In this way, the game can access the system RAM, CPU, and GPU directly without needing Fusion to "translate".

You should be able to run Crysis at "Low" graphics settings and 1024x768 resolution at playable speeds if you boot diretly in to Windows via Boot Camp. Best of luck!

In general, you'll not be able to play most games under vmware, the performance penalty is too great for the virtualization. Perhaps a couple of generations game but nothing that involves 3-D or any FPS type game. In those cases bootcamp so much more suited and I'd go that route.

Hi BritOverseas,

Umm, Crysis is a very demanding game, and needs a beast of a machine to play well. With present technology, it is not possible to play it in a virtual environment. You might be able to get ok performance if you install Windows XP via Boot Camp, and run it that way. Personally, no current Mac will be able to play it up to my standards (1680 X 1050 @ > 60 fps), for that matter I am not aware of a PC that can play it at my standards. Good luck!

Rich S.

I surely hope there will be a major push
to bring more games to OS X without having
to switch to windows.

I have been playing the demo fallout 2 and
man..... I was blown away by the graphics
and gameplay. Thier needs to be more titles
since now apple is pushing these graphic chips.

Yeah, you're losing a lot of your computer's power in the virtualization layer. Enough to severely affect your ability to game.

Boot camp is super easy to set up. The assistant runs a non-destructive partitioner on your drive, then you shut down and boot up holding the Option key. When you are given the option to choose which volume to boot from, insert the Windows DVD and select it from the list of choices. You can then install windows on the new partition (make sure you choose the correct partition!!!).

After windows is installed, boot up into the windows partition using the option key method above, and insert your leopard disk. This will install all the necessary hardware drivers on the windows side of things.

Also, I don't know about VMware, but Parallels allows me to set up a virtual machine from my boot camp partition, so I only need one 1 windows license.

VMWare will also allow you to virtualize a boot camp partition.

The problem with virtualization and gaming is that, while you get direct CPU access and protected memory access, you do not get video access - so there is absolutely no video acceleration, it's all emulated or translated by the virtualizer.

You'll see a very minor CPU hit on anything that just using processor power or takes a lot of data (so long as you have enough physical RAM, and have enough RAM allocated to the virtual machine, to prevent disk swapping), but anything that needs video acceleration will suffer tremendously if it's virtualized.

In general, anything more than Solitare or Minesweeper, and you will want to use Bootcamp if there is no Mac OS X native version of the game (hooray for Blizzard, and all you other mac-native developers). I know the latest versions of VMWare and Parrallels all say they have new DirectX support, and Crossover has a version out just for gaming, but you'll disappoint yourself if you think these will do much more than just show the splash screen and a slide show for most games.

The good news is more game companies are starting to take Mac OS X seriously, and technologies such as Cider are helping developers port their code easier. But it's a long road, and the Macintosh has notoriously been spotty for gaming.

One thing that I've noticed, unfortunately, is that Mac native games can be more expensive than their Window's equivalents.

New games are generally equal in price, but where the Windows version will go down over time, the Mac version is still only available at the release price.