I'm planning to buy Parallels strictly for gaming, there're some games that just run on Windows and this is my chance. I guess if Parallels consumes too much memory or resources so games run smooth and nicely, like there's Parallels consumption plus the game itself. Parallels, Vista and gaming on a Mac December 16, 2007 by retsoced I picked up a copy of Parallels a couple of weeks ago at the Apple Store up in Buffalo at Walden Galleria, so that I could play my PC games when I go left for Christmas.
I have a late 2012 MacBook Pro 13' non-retina display and I use Boot Camp to dual-boot windows and Mac. I recently came across an application called Parallels Desktop for Mac that promised faster and better performance to what I was experiencing when natively loading Windows using Boot Camp.
I have used this software for a couple days and I love it, however I notice a big problem when it comes to gaming on it. What I am seeing is that when I play a Steam game (I.e. Skyrim or Fallout: New Vegas), when it tries to detect the default video settings it sets it to ultra high quality. This would be fine but the problem is, the game does not load at all unless I manually set it to low quality, yet, when I play the game natively, I can get away with using medium quality. My question is, what can I do to actually get the game to play at ultra high quality?
Parallels will rarely be as fast as natively booting Windows via Bootcamp, especially when you're gaming. You're much better off ditching parallels and going back to bootcamp for gaming. By running the VM, you're limiting the amount of resources that are available to OS X and your VM environment; thereby, making each run slower. On some machines where a faster processor and large amounts of RAM are available, may speed it up, but it will never be as smooth as running it natively.
Anil NathaAnil Natha
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