SWTOR + Mac + Parallels

[tethealla]

Hey,
I'm starting to play with running SWTOR via a virtual machine through parallels on my mac. I got it up and running this morning and it was playable but not great. I'm still tweaking. I'm going to try giving the VM more resources and see how that goes. Since I'm borrowing my wife's account, I can only tweak at certain times.

I was reading a forum on the topic and someone posted some numbers. He found that playing via parallels is about 70% as good as playing via bootcamp (actually running windows natively). We'll see if that is good enough on my early-2008 mac.

I'll keep you up to date. I may be able to play with you guys after all!

[tethealla]

OK so I've done more experimentation with good results.

The end summary is I can play with about 45-55FPS with all settings on low. This is definitely playable. I plan to get a copy and try it out.

More Detail:
I have a early 2008 Mac Pro (desktop server) 10gb ram and I upgraded the graphics card last year.

I gave the VM 2 cores, 4gb ram and 1gb video ram.

I downloaded the free Windows 8 developer demo to do my testing. I'm curious if it would work better on a real copy of Windows 7. At some point I may be forced to get one if the W8 demo runs out.

There is a parallels bug with the mouse. If you share a mouse with the mac and PC, it flips out in SW. To fix this, you can dedicate the mouse to the PC. This only works in Coherence mode.
Parallels has two modes
1) VM in a window. The desktop is in a mac window and all the VM's windows are inside of that.
2) Coherence mode. All the VM's windows are rooted on the mac desktop. They pretty much look like normal Mac OS windows

Of course when you dedicate your mouse to the VM, you need to have another pointer device to use on your mac. I have a Magic Touchpad, so it isn't a problem.

If anyone else is interested, this is NOT a cheap way to SWTOR. The game costs $60. Add on Parallels(80) and W7 (100) and you're up to 240.. and on top of that you have the monthly fee.

I bought Parallels for work purposes and I'm going to use the W8 demo for as long as I can. After that, I'll decide if I want to get a copy of W7 or not.

Of course if you go to the trouble of setting this up, you can try out other windows games if you want like RIFT.

[Chamomile]

If you have access to an official Win7 ISO, I believe you can just not enter a serial number when asked and have a month of 'free' before you're forced to activate.

That should be sufficient time to determine if W7 will operate better than the W8 dev install.

[Pocky]

Out of curiosity (and ignorance), why Parallels and not Boot Camp?

I honestly don't know too much about Mac OS. ^^;

[Chamomile]

Because rebooting is bad..?

[tethealla]

Brad: I didn't know that about WIn7. I'll have to see if I can dig up a copy of Win7 and try it out.

Pocky:
Yeah what Brad said. Rebooting is a pain in the ass.
Starting my VM takes seconds (<30). Rebooting will take a few minutes.
Plus while you're playing star wars you can't pause to do something else for a minute and go back. While playing WoW, I'm constantly poking around on the web or checking my email or something. This would be more difficult if I was really running windows.

[Pocky]

How much of a performance difference is there between Boot Camp and Parallels, if any?

[Chamomile]

Technically it should be relatively large. Probably around 20-30%ish since boot camp is native while parallels is a VM and sharing CPU time and memory with the native OS with an emulated environment.

[tethealla]

I found this on the parallels forums.

For playing latest games i recommend using bootcamp instead of Parallels. The 3dmark06 benchmarks on my machine (early 2011 15'' Macbook pro, Radeon 6750M, using latest parallels and vmware fusion) speaks for themselves (rounded to fifties):

Code:

Code: Select all

Version      Mode              Version          Score    Performance
Windows 7    Bootcamp          Catalyst 11.11   9600     100%
Windows 7    Parallels Desktop 7.0.15052        7550      79%
Windows 7    VmWare Fusion     4.1.1            6550      68%
Windows XP   Parallels Desktop 7.0.15052        5300      55%
Windows XP   VmWare Fusion     4.1.1            5550      58%

All machines was set to 3GB ram and 2 cores. Graphics settings was on max.
NOTE: Windows XP cant use more than 256MB GPU RAM that is the reason why it scores so low.
NOTE2: Also, this table does not represent the performance on NVidia GPU's, on NVidia this may be completely different.

http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.p ... 985&page=2

[Fiddletwix]

I'm playing on Parallels 7 as well and am having success with my bootcamp partition. The memory leaks in SWTOR are killer at times but nothing that a client restart can't fix.

For sake of comparison, I have almost the same exact rig

* 2008 Mac Pro
* 12GB of memory
* Flashed PC ATI 6870.

For my VM I have Vista(copy I bought specifically for bootcamping/VM'ing) and I give it 8 cpus and 4 GB of memory. Giving it 8GB actually made things worse. To get the game to play well I turn everything low, turn off the grass and vegetation and turn off shadows. I play just fine at 1920x1080 with 30-60FPS.

I tried playing with an ATI 4870 but it was too chunky on the graphics, upgrading to the 6870 made the difference. I also don't have my

As far as Boot Camp: I just do too much on my mac to dual boot. I like the idea of just switching virtual desktops and I'm back on a mac quickly vpn'ing to fix things at work. In fact, that happened twice this weekend.