I am using an Xbox 360 controller so I don't care about the mouse, plus the game play is better with the controller.
Sound Issues I have Sky rim working but the sound gives me a cracking sound through the whole game even when I use the built in sound card it is a little better. Has anyone else had issues with this?
I have been playing Skyrim all afternoon on my iMac 2011 on Ultra High settings. Absolutely perfect in PD7, straight install from Steam. Yes! No bootcamp required!
Smart Mouse doesn't seem to matter. I've found Smart Mouse doesn't have any effect on screen stutter/tracking, on or off. In fact in games like L4D2 with smart mouse off you lose your pointer. You also, generally, have poorer mouse performance. This seems to be a core issue with Parallel's mouse emulation. Playing a twitch based first-person shooter reveals the bug more than slow-moving Skyrim as well. If you dart left and right with your mouse you will see the screen "skip back" slightly in the opposite direction you were moving. This often leads you to pointing in a direction not intended by your movements. Which in turn can make you dizzy in real-life! lol. I hope the devs can look at this. Because sans that, playing games in Parallels is nearly always better than anything I've seen from the "real" ports on Steam or in the App Store. For the record my Skyrim settings are... 1440x900 HIGH (no AA, doesn't seem to work in any game as is. Para bug?) 4GB of my 8GB for P7. 1GB to video and all 8-cores from my (2010) i7 iMac. This gets me smooth fps once things are loaded with only the occasional stutter as the swap file is hit back in OSX to feed Para's ram needs. I know an SSD and another 8GB (16gb max) would make P7 game playing nearly a seamless affair. Just waiting on that tax return. "He Who Is Too Lazy To Run Bootcamp And Enjoys Watching Windows Dance For Him Inside Osx."
Sorry mr_q, but I can't agree with some of what you said. I have a mid 2011 3.4GHz i7 iMac with 16Gb RAM and there is no way that PD7 comes close to running games like in Bootcamp for example, or the Mac 'ports' on Steam. No matter how 'acceptable' the performance is in PD7, there is no way it s as good as you describe. Some examples: Deus Ex HR: unplayable in PD7 - probably about 5 fps after 30 second waits for textures to load F1 2011: unplayable in PD7 LA Noire: unplayable in PD7 Skyrim: works well in PD7, but still not as well as Bootcamp Witcher 2: just about playable at lower resolutions (1900x1080), but a real struggle.
I think you're trying at tool high a resolution. Skyrim is the highest resolution I've been able to run yet. Mostly I play at 720. Medium to high. Skyrim and all the valve games I can play at 900 with high settings. Bootcamp is better, yes. But P7 has been plenty for my casual play. As for the ports, all the valve and telltale games have self shadow artifacts that I do not have in P7.
No, I'm not trying at too high a res, what I am saying is that no matter what, the PD7 performance is NEVER going to be as good as Bootcamp. End of story. The Valve games on the Mac work perfectly, much better than running the Windows version under PD7. I think you are over-exaggerating the performance of games under PD7.
The pointer issue is something that all VM solutions have. It's present in VMware and Sun as well. The known workaround is turning off Smart Mouse and run the Windows app in Windowed mode. It's far from ideal though as running in Windowed mode eats resources that's already spread a bit thin by emulating. I really hope Parallels figure out something to solve this as it's a problem in most 3D games.
The biggest pain I find is the inability to change the brightness in games. I guess that's linked to the issue of anti-aliasing changes, etc. also not working.
I was playing skyrim, and it did its usual crash, but it didnt close down! Its stuck and every time i try to reset parallels it just stays there when i start it back up! I trying force quit and it said it force quit it but the screen just stayed there on, press e to talk to Karliah. My mac part of parallels works perfectly, never froze or crashed once *knock on wood*. I have the 2012 macbook pro retina but it doesnt even work on high settings, it is very laggy at 7 fps...Please reply! D:
