Hi, Thanks for a fantastic job on Parallels for OS X ! I have tried all the past and current emulators (VPC, GuestPC, iEmulator, Wintel, Q, Bootcamp, etc...) and Parallels offers the best performance/ease of use ratio so far. The only annoying thing is the video speed. This has been th eproblem with all the other emulators until Apple came out with amazing drivers for Bootcamp ...from ATI ! I haven't found a way to extraxct the video drivers from the Apple install wizard and the wizard won't run under Parallels ATI does make X1600 for PCs (like ACER and ASUS) and i'm wondering if there's a way to install those drivers on Parallels or if somebody from the Parallels team finds a way to improve the video card speed That way we'll be close to perfection ! Keep up the good work guys and keep us posted !
Comparing Parallels to Boot Camp is comparing Apples and Oranges. Boot Camp is just running your machine as a PC with native drivers etc. Apple did nothing special with those ATI drivers other then release them.
Video Drivers Yes, BootCamp and Parallels are fundamentally different. BootCamp is just Windows running on the Apple Hardware, with drivers supplied that support the hardware. This was relatively simple, as most of the hardware in the box are standard off-the-shelf Intel components, or common video chipsets. Drivers were readily available, and just needed to be bundled. Under Parallels, the normal driver for, say, the video card won't work because it would then conflict with the driver Mac OSX is using to drive the video. What you end up needing is a new driver for the video that cooperates with the OSX driver using the same hardware. It is possible to see impressive performance this way, as a lot of video cards support a "picture-in-picture" type setup. In other words, they support several different applications or OS's sending commands to different "windows" within the viewable area. It's just a matter of someone spending time to write the driver- which can be a large undertaking. It's been done before though.
I know, i know... Thanks for your quick replies guys, I know that Bootcamp and Parallels are quite different. I was just trying to explain how happy i am with the current Parallels speed and functionality. It's almost THE Perfect thing but for one thing : the video driver performance. I know that it's beta software and that it might improve... it's just that almost every other aspect is great and i would love to have the Dream environment... So let's wait and see what happens...
