Very unhappy...

[novataglio]

I purchased Parallels 3 (two copies actually) because of what was said about the product. I knew a VM wouldn't ever be as fast as native booting but "near native" was taken as fact. I was figuring 75% to 50% speeds.

-New! Run today’s most popular PC games on a Mac with support for 3D graphics
-Play the hottest 3D games! OpenGL and DirectX support lets you explore a whole new world of 3D games and applications right on your Mac. Play Half-Life 2 and work in Sony Vegas at near native speeds right in your Parallels virtual machine.
-Play Windows-only 3D games, such as World of Warcraft, Half-Life 2, and Unreal Tournament
-Render in complex 3D CAD programs such as 3DMark
-Work with CPU-intensive video and sound editing software such as Sony Vegas
-Run mission-critical 3D applications on your Mac
-Enjoy your favorite Windows-only games and graphics applications directly in your Windows virtual machine at full native speed without rebooting


And all those lies are just on three pages! Let alone all the free advertising from other sites stating these same claims. I have a Mac Pro, 4GB of RAM, nothing running on the OS X side and I'm lucky if I can see the bird flying on the HL2 splash screen where you pick "New Game" I maxed out all the settings I could for the VM and yes I did enable DX.

At this point I'm trying to figure out if I need to call my bank and tell them to cancel payment or just eat a $130 loss. Tech support has been absolutely no help and simply said "Enable DirectX."

 

[Ankou]

Hello novataglio
Please keep in mind what Parallels Desktop 3.0 is the first released virtualization software to deliver 3D support to the Mac. There are still some limitations on using the 3D support.
We will try to fix all bugs in next free version of Parallels

 

[pogo]

Funny how you start telling us all to bear stuff in mind *after* we've stumped up the cash, based on your plainly "over-enthusiastic" advertising. That's just not good enough. Sure, it might well be fixed in the future, but the fact is you're advertising it as fixed now, which is why we paid for the software. There's no point splitting hairs about what you define "working" to mean - the fact is that you're over-selling the software and then trying to cover your tracks.

 

[darkone]

did some of the posts get deleted here ??

 

[spectre]

According to my moderator access rights - no posts were deleted. It's not like we are imposing any serious censorship on forums, just look on the other threads
I can't talk on our marketing behalf, but from my personal point of view I can tell the following on the 3D support:
There are basically two ways of implementing 3D support - OpenGL and DirectX. OpenGL in 3.0 is quite solid, so you should be really able to play some "heavy" 3D games (take Prey for example, when it was released - I was astonished by the graphics and gameplay). But unfortunately Microsoft is pushing hard and the most of the recent games use DirectX. And here comes the bad part - implementing DirectX passthrough for the Virtual Machine running on Mac is not a simple deal (as it was pointed in many threads by our users). And still our developers have got it working in the VM, although it still has quite a room for improvement. But the impression you are getting about being "ripped off" by the adv is all about DirectX games. I understand your frustration and our development team is already coding the minor (i.e. free) update for 3.0 to improve the current issues. Be assured, we are closely monitoring the customer feedback to the support and on these forums and will do our best to make 3.0 version better.

 

[novataglio]

I appreciate the replies. I understand its a new product and will need tweaking but when advertising on your site specifically says "Play Half-Life 2 and work in Sony Vegas at near native speeds right in your Parallels virtual machine." you assume that at LEAST that game will run the way it claims. Had the advertising said "Current OpenGL games running at near native speeds." and later in spec notes or whatever stating the limitations and current standing of DX8.1 emulation I would have known what I was getting into and not been upset in the least. The frustration and disappointment comes from the false advertising, not the product itself which seems quite solid.

 

[pogo]

I agree wholeheartedly with novataglio - if the ad blurb wasn't so misleading I wouldn't be so pissed off. The ad reads "play Half-Life 2 at near-native speeds". Tell me that's not misleading...

I'm still pissed off about the whole upgrade/internationalization issue (I'm in the UK - how come I was allowed to spend money on a US-only upgrade?), but that's for another thread.

 

[Leauki]

-New! Run today’s most popular PC games on a Mac with support for 3D graphics

That is true.

-Play the hottest 3D games! OpenGL and DirectX support lets you explore a whole new world of 3D games and applications right on your Mac. Play Half-Life 2 and work in Sony Vegas at near native speeds right in your Parallels virtual machine.

That is true too.

-Play Windows-only 3D games, such as World of Warcraft, Half-Life 2, and Unreal Tournament

I thought World of Warcraft was available for Macintosh??? But the general claim ("Play Windows-only 3D games...") is true.

-Render in complex 3D CAD programs such as 3DMark

That is true.

-Work with CPU-intensive video and sound editing software such as Sony Vegas

Don't know Sony Vegas, but it is true that one can work with such applications.

-Run mission-critical 3D applications on your Mac

Can do.

-Enjoy your favorite Windows-only games and graphics applications directly in your Windows virtual machine at full native speed without rebooting

That is true too. There is no emulation involved, hence the virtual machine is running at full native speed. The hypervisor and OS (both host and guest) create some overhead, but the remaining speed is still "full native speed" in the same way that a hardware PC running Windows features "full native speed" (including OS overhead).


Not sure what you are complaining about.

 

[pogo]

Specifically, that they say "play Half Life 2 at near-native speeds". They *don't* say you have to turn down all the prettiness to get it to run at anything approaching a playable speed. The blurb is plainly misleading. That's what I'm complaining about.

I'm also complaining about the way they pushed the upgrade - I stumped up the cash only to find that the initial download (4124) was US-only and wouldn't work with my UK version. Granted, 4128 fixed that pretty quickly, but not before I spent a weekend trying to figure out what was going wrong and getting well pissed off in the process. Their download page mentioned NOTHING WHATSOEVER about it being US-only, so basically they were taking people's cash, fully aware that the download wouldn't work outside of the US. They then try and palm us off with crap like "of course it takes time to release the international versions" - that's simply not good enough. They should make that explicit on the download page.