Published September 1, 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 this first part, we look at Parallels running on a Mac Pro, souped up with a GTX 570. We upgraded from Parallels 7, and used our Boot Camp Windows 7 install for all our testing. Installation was surprisingly painless (aside from an odd bug affecting Wacom tablets) and we were up and running almost immediately.

There are some new features that affect integration with OS 10.8, but we jumped right in to the important stuff– the video options.

Interestingly enough, there’s a setting for “DirectX10 (experimental), so that was the one we opted for. Parallels are boasting that you’ll see a 30% improvement in 3D graphics over Parallels Desktop 7. But are they to be trusted? We fired it up and did some tests to find out.

Set up

First things first, for this battery of tests, we are using the following configuration:

• Mac Pro 2010 2.8 Quad-Core Intel Xeon (4 CPUs allocated to Parallels)
• 10 GB RAM (4 GB allocated to Parallels)
• NVidia GTX 570 (512 MB video RAM allocated to Parallels)
• DirectX 9 (Parallels 7), DirectX 10 (Parallels 8)
• Vertical synchronisation enabled
• Full-screen (1920×1080) in all cases
• Windows 7 (Boot Camp configuration)
• Parallels Desktop 7.0.15106
• Parallels Desktop 8.0.18100
• All games tested had settings optimised to run smoothly 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.

3DMark06 Test

The ubiquitous DirectX 9 benchmarking utility was our first port of call. 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	33.767	31.221	49.973	29.867	0.991	1.335	3899	3992	2875	9342
Parallels Desktop 8	40.884	36.156	71.149	51.094	1.110	1.604	4622	6112	3335	12294
Windows	57.711	56.686	82.526	57.599	1.705	2.331	6864	7006	4984	16376

So, in the benchmark at least, there’s a definite improvement over the previous version. Going by the 3DMark score alone, the 30% claim is justified. What’s also interesting is that we’re catching up on pure Windows here, which is itself only scoring a 25% improvement over Parallels.

But no-one trusts a standard benchmark, so we give you: Games We Actually Ran, with glorious DATA!

Space Marine Test

Space Marine is a pretty run-of-the-mill game in terms of graphics performance, it generally runs very smoothly. We carved up some Orks for a minute and then had a look at the results.

	Parallels Desktop 7	Parallels Desktop 8	Windows
Min FPS	3	1	47
Max FPS	30	31	62
Average FPS	18	18.033	59.467

Embarrassingly, the stats didn’t get properly for PD7 run, hence on the first half are there. There was also severe frame drop in the PD8 version when a Steam notification popped up. Moving on…

Skyrim (Modded) Test

Skyrim has been criticised for its lacklustre graphics engine and textures. However when bolstered with some of the many mods available (as we’ve done in this case) it can look quite spectacular.

	Parallels Desktop 7	Parallels Desktop 8	Windows
Min FPS	0	0	10
Max FPS	24	27	48
Average FPS	16	15.367	29.967

So not a huge improvement over Parallels 7 here.

The Witcher 2 Test

The Witcher 2 is one of the most graphically intensive game ever created, so it seemed a natural fit for these tests.

	Parallels Desktop 7	Parallels Desktop 8	Windows
Min FPS	0	0	0
Max FPS	1	21	62
Average FPS	0.05	11.104	25.556

Well this was so unplayable on Parallels 7 that we gave up on it. With Parallels 8, it’s still not very good, but at least you have a fighting chance of playing the game (especially if you tweak the settings). Also notable was that there were strange graphical issues with Parallels 7 that didn’t exist with 8. I’m not sure what the cause of the frame drop was in the Windows version at the end.

Fallout: New Vegas (Modded) Test

As with Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas  can be made to look spectacular with the liberal application of several mods.

	Parallels Desktop 7	Parallels Desktop 8	Windows
Min FPS	0	0	13
Max FPS	28	30	65
Average FPS	12.933	12.979	49.263

That’s pretty much identical between the two versions. Please try to ignore the fact that I kept getting killed within a minute…

Saints Row: The Third Test

In both versions of Parallels, Volition’s freeform, silly take on Grand Theft Auto crashed in DirectX 9 mode. It ran under Parallels 8 in DirectX 10 mode, but with severe graphical glitches. We gave up at that point.

Batman Arkham City Test

	Parallels Desktop 7	Parallels Desktop 8	Windows
Min FPS	3	6	0
Max FPS	21	34	46
Average FPS	15.067	19.167	22.53

Of all the tests, this was the one that demonstrated the 30% improvement in performance in a real game. Ignoring the end of the Windows result (it appears some background process kicked in), this game most closely resembled the results of the 3DMark benchmark.

Coming up in the next part, we do some tests on the MacBook Pro with Retina.