Gaming and Parallels/VMWare

According to benchmarks Parallels would be the preferred VM for gaming. However, VMs are not ideal platforms for gaming because they cannot provide the speed needed by some games, so don't expect your games to look the same as on a dedicated machine such as using Boot Camp for Windows instead of virtualization software.

Even if you go VM route, install it first on its own partition, Boot Camp Assistant, so you can run either / or VM or natively.

Yes, Parallels can create a VM directly from your Boot Camp Windows system.

VM gaming may not render as clear or bright screen images as direct play. Also keyboard interaction
may suffer slight key press delays, this makes a "shooter" game harder to play. Some Keys may have
to be remapped as well to avoid conflicts.

In action Games, video may be choppy as well, but that mostly depends on your Hardware and the
Game's CPU demands. Obviously, if your machine hardware is fast enough, the extra VM translation
demands won't matter.

Parallels will... run and load Windows off the (boot camp) partition just like it would off a virtual disk (sparse disk image).

Keyboarding was an issue for me, and PC gamers tend to want the highest frames, highest performing graphic cards too (ATI 5800+ or GTX 480s).

A VM will never use more than two cores out of a 4-core system, so you tend to run on half your resources, shared video etc. No?

"A VM will never use more than two cores out of a 4-core system, so you tend to run on half your resources, shared video etc. No?"

Yep, but like I said, If you got one of the new i5 or i7 monsters, you might never notice a slowdown,
even with the most demanding software.
Many older games play fine on any intel Mac, but of course, many of the newer games require later
directx versions than those currently supported by VM's. Of course many games and other programs,
won't (can't) utilize multiple cores, so that may not be an issue, depending on software.

The only way to really know is to try it. 🙂