Published October 2, 2012 by Ninja Foodstuff in Articles

Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac is out now, letting you run Windows games on your Mac without rebooting. Having had a love-hate relationship with Parallels, where I’d try gaming with it on occasion and inevitably get frustrated and just use Boot Camp, I figured it was time to have another look.

In part 1 of our Parallels Desktop 8 benchmarks, we looked at performance of a Mac Pro with an Nvidia GTX 570. In this part, we’ll be looking at the 2012 MacBook Pro with Retina. Much commotion has been made of Parallel’s retina features in version 8. With version 7, the best compromise between running Windows at a higher resolution whilst still having everything readable was to run it at 1920×1200.

For the sake of these benchmarks though, I’ll be setting the resolution in Windows and in each of the tests to the maximum 2800×1800.

Set up

This time around, we’re using the following configuration:

• MacBook Pro with Retina 2012 2.3 Intel Core i7 (2 CPUs allocated to Parallels)
• 8 GB RAM (4 GB allocated to Parallels)
• Nvidia 650M (512 MB video RAM allocated to Parallels)
• DirectX 9 (Parallels 7), DirectX 10 (Parallels 8)
• Vertical synchronisation enabled
• Full-screen (2800×1800) in all cases, fonts scaled to 150%
• Windows 7 64-bit (Boot Camp configuration)
• Mac OS 10.8.2
• Parallels Desktop 7.0.15106
• Parallels Desktop 8.0.18101
• All games tested had settings optimised to as run (as smoothly as possible) in Windows rather than Parallels.

We ran each test on Parallels version 7, Parallels version 8, and in Windows/Boot Camp (as a baseline). We recorded the video and frame rate simultaneously using FRAPS, whose presence may or may not have skewed some of the results.

As an aside we noticed that with Parallels Desktop 7, the resolution would get reset each time we fired Boot Camp up. This did not happen with version 8.

3DMark06 Test

As before, we ran all the tests in the suite, with anti-aliasing and filtering maxed out.

Platform	GT1	GT2	HDR1	HDR2	CPU1	CPU2	SM 2.0 score	HDR/SM 3.0 score	CPU score	3DMark score
Parallels Desktop 7	12.831	16.220	16.116	18.739	0.920	1.404	1708	1743	2841	4625
Parallels Desktop 8	13.374	16.290	16.515	20.434	1.014	1.604	1780	1847	3188	4848
Windows	12.814	13.595	15.284	12.358	1.970	2.749	1585	1382	5819	4175

So incredibly, that seems to suggest that even Parallels 7 runs better (except for the CPU tests) than Boot Camp! I can only imagine that the Nvidia drivers I was using in Windows (296.49) are not optimised for the 650M yet. Regardless, again an overall improvement here, but only by 5%.

Dawn of War II: Retribution Test

Real-time strategy games don’t tend to tax a system’s GPU much, but this one sure does when it’s in full swing. We ran the built-in benchmark test and examined the results.

	Parallels Desktop 7	Parallels Desktop 8	Windows
Min FPS	0	0	5
Max FPS	17	17	30
Average FPS	8.767	9.55	14.467

So hardly any improvement to be seen here.

Just Cause 2 Test

Just Cause 2 is all about big explosions and general carnage. In Parallels 7, the game wouldn’t even launch. It worked with Parallels Desktop 8, albeit with some graphical aberrations  We first ran the built-in “Concrete Jungle” benchmark, which refused to run correctly under Parallels, so then we just tried some gameplay, which gave us more promising results.

	Parallels Desktop 7	Parallels Desktop 8	Windows
Min FPS	N/A	0	9
Max FPS	N/A	8	26
Average FPS	N/A	5.917	19.15

Definitely some graphical glitches under Parallels Desktop 8 (but at least it runs).

Dungeon Siege III Test

Obsidian’s dungeon crawler is very sparkly and runs quite well at retina resolution. We hacked and slashed our way through an early level to bring the results.

	Parallels Desktop 7	Parallels Desktop 8	Windows
Min FPS	2	1	6
Max FPS	16	14	25
Average FPS	10.617	10.417	18.033

Did you spot that the Parallels Desktop 8 version was missing a blue channel?

Of all the tests we’ve done, this was the only instance where Parallels 7 actually fared better than Parallels 8, both in terms of performance and image quality.

Orcs Must Die Test

Of all the games we tested, this ran the smoothest both in Boot Camp and Parallels, though sadly some graphical artefacts under Parallels make it somewhat unplayable.

	Parallels Desktop 7	Parallels Desktop 8	Windows
Min FPS	5	9	15
Max FPS	13	20	30
Average FPS	7.8	14.85	21.878

That retina option

Parallels Desktop 8 has a new setting “Optimize Windows for full resolution”. As advertised, it does perform the task very well, with the UI elements and text becoming much more readable at the high resolution, and this alone seems to be a good reason to upgrade.

Conclusion

It’s not particularly viable to run most of these games at such a high resolution, in Boot Camp or otherwise. That said, there’s not much of a performance increase between Parallels Desktop 7 and 8 for retina MacBooks (but a huge difference between Parallels and Boot Camp), and certainly nothing like the performance we were seeing in part 1 on the Mac Pro.

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, your best bet for gaming in Windows on a MacBook Pro with Retina is to forgo the 2880×1800 resolution and run it at something lower, like 1920×1200.