Parallels 6 - Battlefield Bad Company 2

I've just tested BFBC2 in Parallels 6 on my Core i7 iMac. Wow. It actually starts up, and the game is even more or less playable at 2560x1440 resolution in low detail. The control latency makes it somewhat painful, though.

The main problem, however, is a graphical artefact. A sort of "mesh" like effect that's rendered a few meters from the camera and makes seeing anything beyond it somewhat difficult. Otherwise. Wow. Colour me impressed!

Windows 7 boots extremely quickly, runs extremely quickly and generally feels much more like it *should* than it did in Parallels 5. It would be interesting to try Windows XP performance, as Parallels 5 really messed up in that respect, somehow. Windows XP was snappy in V4, but downright painful in V5.

 

For control latency, try Virtual Machine -> Configure -> Options -> Advanced -> Optimize modifier keys for games.

XP seems to boot faster now as well but I don't think the majority of the problem was with Parallels Desktop. XP seems to want to load a lot of crap when the desktop appears (system tray icons appear slowly one at a time as they load). Maybe I installed some stuff that causes a slowdown. Stuff like ATI Catalyst drivers (I use a Boot Camp partition and have an ATI graphics card) which gives a warning every time I boot using Parallels because Parallels has it's in graphics hardware. The Catalyst warning takes a few minutes to appear after the desktop appears so maybe it's being slowed down by something else loading. Anyway, when everything is done loading, XP becomes responsive again. Disabling Share Mac Applications with Windows may help.

 

Philip,

BBC2 issue is specific to ATI graphics chips and Snow Leopard Graphics Update. We've filed a bug on Apple, so this will take some time to resolve.