Would more RAM help?
I'm using a MB Pro 15" w/ 1Gb RAM, XP guest. In general, video performance has been fine. Until today -- I finally splurged and got a 30" Cinema Display. Man... how did I ever live before this thing? BUT.... my XP guest (as expected?) is now dog slow.
I think I understand the basic issue -- I'm now running the host at 2560x1600 and the guest at 2048x1280, so copying entire screen frames will be slower. But even if I lower the guest back down to 1440x900 (like before) it is still much slower running under the Cinema Display host resolution.
My question is that the only variable I can see that I can change is my memory -- I was planning on upgrading to 2Gb anyway -- would this (along with boosting the guest memory) help with the video performance at all? I realize this is not the same as video memory, but I assume that the frame buffering occurs in virtual memory, i.e., the hard drive? If I have a larger swap file available, will the graphics system be able to utilize more of it for better speed? I hope I'm not just out of luck...
EDIT: Playing around with different guest resolutions, I'm finding that if I stick to about 1600x1200 or below, the latency for typing, dragging windows, etc. is acceptable. Anything more than that and it becomes a noticeable issue (esp. with typing). 1600x1200 is OK (better than 1440x900) but it's still sort of defeating the purpose of having a 30" screen
BTW -- I noticed in XP under Display > Settings > Advanced > Adapter that the video adapter (Parallels Video Driver) has a memory size of 8MB. That seems pretty small -- my guess is that since it is all virtual anyway, that number doesn't matter, but since I really don't know, I thought I'd ask. Is that something that I can increase somewhere or is it irrelevant?
Last edited: Jun 17, 2006