Ideal RAM

[Stiffler]

I am wanting to try parallels for the first time and I was wondering how much ram that I should allocate to Parallels if I was to buy the Windows 8 edition. I have the new baseline Retina display Mac, so obviously I have 8GB of RAM. I would be using parallels for the 2013 MS Office and the occasional game that can not run on Mac. I would also probably be buying the new Elder Scrolls MMO next year and be running it. On the other hand I would only be using the Mac for a few Apps and maybe photoshop. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[danieltharris]

I personally have 8GB assigned to my Windows 8 VM (I have a 16GB Retina MBP), but I use Windows a lot for development and more.

I'd probably just go with 2-4GB if you're just running those apps above it will be more than enough. Windows 8 should only need similar spec to Windows 7 (Which i've seen running on 768GB Ram and a Pentium 4 at half decent performance levels for office/web)

For running games, I don't know how good Parallels is as i've not tried it. For maximum performance maybe run bootcamp AND Parallels on the same partition so you can do a full boot into Windows and get every bit of performance out of games.

Also I have currently assigned 256MB Video to the VM, but I would imagine increasing this will help with games.