Install Windows 10 on a Mac Pro 5,1

I happen to already have a copy of Parallels on my cMP that I use to run Ubuntu, so I could just add a Windows 10 VM to it after I purchase an activation key.

If you think it'll work well enough in virtualization, I can give that a try as a plan A - I guess I was just under the impression that virtualization would have significantly worse performance than a native installation. But then again, I haven't done much with virtual machines, so I could easily be wrong.

They might still offer Windows 10 free, I’d have to check.

My online program is for game programming & development, but I’m not 100% what exact tools and software I’d be using. The only application named in the curriculum is Autodesk 3DS Max, a 3D modeling, rendering, and animation software.

I suppose I can try doing a virtual machine as Plan A (since the setup is easier), then if that doesn't meet my needs, try doing a native install. Unfortunately, I likely won't know if virtualization will meet my needs until I actually start my program in early May.

I just want to know how to do a native install so I can be prepared if it comes to that, so thank you for sharing that forum thread with me.

So as a bit of tinkering, I installed a Windows 10 virtual machine on Parallels and configured it for the "games" mode to hopefully get the most performance out of it. I haven't activated Windows yet, since I haven't really had a reason to yet - it's letting me run it just fine so far. As a test, I downloaded and installed Blender (an open-source 3D modeling, animation, and rendering application) on the virtual machine and tried running it.

First impressions aren't good. Even with an empty project, the app runs with a lot of lag. I'm guessing the biggest reason for this is the fact that I could only allocate a maximum of 8GB of virtual RAM to my virtual machine, coupled with the fact that the virtual machine uses system memory for graphics. I think it simply needs more memory to run 3D graphics software smoothly, which Parallels just won't let me give it.

It looks like this is a limitation of the standard edition of Parallels, as the Pro edition allows you to allocate up to 128GB of virtual RAM per virtual machine, along with more virtual CPUs. I could try upgrading, but I don't know for sure if being able to allocate more resources would even help or not, or if the issue lies with the use of virtualization itself.

Strange, I didn't encounter that issue when installing and opening Blender on Windows on my cMP. It never gave me any errors about the graphics card or drivers, it just runs super slow. Maybe it's a driver issue in your case? I might check my own drivers as well to see if they need to be updated.

After a bit of research on the issue of Blender running super slow, it's possible that it may be laggy due to reasons related to the application itself and not the virtual machine or hardware. I'll tinker with settings in the program to see if I can get any improvement, and try out other applications that make use of 3D graphics, to see if I run into the same kind of issue there.

Just checking back in. Any luck on getting Blender to run on your Windows VM?