Windows 7/Aero slower under Snow Leopard

M

Marc Hoffman

Member
I have been running Windows 7 on Parallels 5 (build 5.0.9.344) on Mac OS X 10.4.11. I used the "hack" to get Aero to work (the video.dx_profile=6 switch). Performance of Aero was very good on this system.

Yesterday, I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.6.2. I removed the video.dx_profile=6 hack, as aero is supported on Mac OS X 10.6.2 in Parallels. The first thing that I noticed was that Aero graphics performance slowed waaaaaaay down. I had to disable window transparency to get the system to a tolerable state.

Is there something that I'm missing? Shouldn't upgrading to Snow Leopard have increased the performance?
 
confirmed...

I just did a test on Windows Vista with Aero, and it's speed is very good on Snow Leopard. I did a clean install of Windows 7, and the graphics ran VERY slow.

What's the deal with Windows 7/Aero/Mac OS X 10.6?
 
anyone...anyone???

Parallels, can you comment on this?
Click to expand...

Marc, we will check it side by side and return back to you.
So far, I can only suggest to try decrease RAM VM downto 1GB.
I'm aware of at least one degradation in SL done by Apple, which may in some situations lead to delays with big VM RAM.
 
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Are you saying that vista aero runs faster than win7 aero in parallels? Interesting. I hope i still have a backup of a vista VM that I set up a year ago.. I'd like to try that... Are you running 32 bit or 64 bit Windows 7? Have you tried both Vista and Windows 7 with Parallels 5?
 
What type of machine is this all running on? have you tried the hack again? windows 7 has a huge overhead compared to XP. It requires more processing / ram power to get the job done.

I run Win7 (64bit) using the latest build of Parallels 5.0 with about 1-2GB of ram and it works flawlessly under 32-bit OSX. I have snow-leopard but due to a lot of bugs I made a choice to downgrade back to 32-bit. I would point the finger more at Apple than at Parallels. I have had a lot of buggy application crashing or sticking under SL (snow leopard).
 
I'm running on the following:

Mac Pro/Quad 2Ghz
6GB RAM
Snow Leopard
Parallels 5 Build 509.344

Just to reiterate, Aero does run on both Vista and Windows 7. Aero just runs MUCH slower under Windows 7. I have tried the hack, but that made no difference. Windows 7 Aero ran MUCH faster under Tiger on this same machine (with some very noticeable graphics "artifacts").

I'll post some screen casts later today.
 
Let me try to load vista and win 7 on my mac pro. which has these specs:

2x2.66 GHz dual core Xeon
2GB 667 DDR2
7200 RPM hard drive

I saw the video and you can see the difference soon as you opened my computer. you can tell there is a 40% lag or stall when you move the windows around.

I recently upgrade to version 5.0 just to run windows 7 as well. what version of windows 7 are you using? I have ultimate for my home use and enterprise for work (which is basically ultimate). What version of vista are you using?. I know this sounds crazy but try to downgrade your ram to 4GB and try the VM. I run win7 on my laptop which is less powerful than both of our Mac Pro's / 2006 Mac book Pro which has less processing power. Again its the enterprise bloated version as well.
 
I'm running 32-bit versions of both OSes (although i did test 64-bit Win7 and still saw the performance issue). The Vista is Business, and 7 is Ultimate.

Each virtual machine has 2gb RAM and 256mb of video RAM.
 
system configuration

Hi...

Sorry this has taken so long. Here's my config:

Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro1,1
Processor Name: Dual-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2 GHz
Number Of Processors: 2
Total Number Of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per processor): 4 MB
Memory: 6 GB
Bus Speed: 1.33 GHz

Here's my graphics card info:

NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT:

Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT
Type: GPU
Bus: PCIe
Slot: Slot-1
PCIe Lane Width: x16
VRAM (Total): 256 MB
Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)
Device ID: 0x0393
Revision ID: 0x00a1
ROM Revision: 3008
Displays:
VA912b:
Resolution: 1280 x 1024 @ 75 Hz
Pixel Depth: 32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Rotation: Supported
 
re: aero

Holy cow!! I just upgraded to Mac OS X 10.6.3, and I noticed right off that general graphics operations (such as expose) on the Mac seemed faster. After bringing up Parallels, Windows 7 graphics are MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH FASTER!!!

It appears that Apple fixed something to increase the graphics speed overall in 10.6.3.
 
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