DX10+? Ever?

P

PragmaticReviteer

Junior Member
I notice that the new Parallels still doesn't support anything better than the 8 year old DirectX 9. I am a Revit user, and Revit is a purely DX app, and Parallels is the "Preferred virtualization provider" for Autodesk, or some such. And yet, STILL, we have nearly decade old support for graphics APIs? What gives?
Truth be told, I don't see myself upgrading Parallels again, without meaningful graphics API support improvements. Anyone at Parallels care to comment on why DX support is lagging by the better part of a decade? It seems absurd to even talk about graphics performance improvements when the API support is so lacking. Like Ford trumpeting performance improvements of their new line of horse drawn buggies.

Gordon
 
It's now. In PD8.

DirectX 10 support is introduced in PD8. OS X 10.7.4+ is required to enable it.
Note: performance may vary depending on your Mac graphics chip.
 
Wow, and yet no mention in either of the reviews I have seen, nor any of the Parallels materials? Perhaps I am more of an edge case than I think, as I would expect this to be something that Parallels is really crowing about. Especially since the new VMWare just released is still DX9 also. In any case, WOOT! Suddenly I am looking forward to the upgrade. Finally getting anti-aliasing in Revit will be really nice.
I wonder, is there a web page that lists the supported/suggested GPUs? I will need to decide if I am upgrading my 2011 MBP or my 2010 iMac, at least short term.

Thanks,
Gordon
 
It stands for improved graphics. No doubt it will get mentioned specifically, we're just a few hours into the launch.
DX10 requires Intel HD3000 or better, NVIDIA 8800/9400 or better, ATI 2400/2600 or better. Discreet graphics is definitely recommended. Geometry shaders will run in hardware on ATI 6xxx in OS X 10.8 or on NVIDIA GT120 and above. But then again not all apps make heavy use of it. The top performers now are ATI 6xxx and NVIDIA GT650.
As for upgrading you Macs, I'd suggest to try PD8 on your current machines first.
 
Thanks for the detail! As for upgrade, I have the two options, a MBP with HD 6770M and an iMac 27" with 6970M.
The other thing I will need to consider is any interaction with ScreenFlow when recording training videos, which only happens on the MBP. I suspect it will be the iMac that gets upgraded first, next week when I am back stateside.
And if this works as I hope, I think it will make some Mac Revit users very happy.

Thanks!
Gordon
 
And I JUST noticed that you said 10.7.4 required, not 10.8. Hot damn, I can get my anti-aliasing without worrying about ScreenFlow in Mountain Lion. Can't wait to start seeing some reports about how well this works. Come ON you gamers, you want this too, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and if it blows up your machines it doesn't ruin your life the way blowing up a production work machine would. ;) So come on, someone download this and report back on Crysis performance or something.

Gordon
 
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