Filed under: Software, Found Footage
Found Footage: Quake 4 running in Parallels 3.0
Last Friday Ben Rudolph, Parallel's Director of Corporate Communications, posted some screenshots of Halflife 2 running in Parallels 3.0 on his MacBook Pro. Parallels, for those who might not know, is virtualization software that lets you run a variety of OSes within OS X including Windows. Pictures sure are pretty, but the proof is in the video (a great man once said that), and so Ben has posted a video of Quake 4 running on a Mac in Parallels (I am going to assume he used his MacBook Pro for this as well, but he never mentions it so it could be running on a Mac Pro).
As we reported, support for 3D acceleration is one of the big ticket items in Parallels Desktop for the Mac 3.0 (no known shipping date as of yet).
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
noob said 9:15PM on 6-04-2007
i think running quake 3 might be a stretch. crawling is more like it.
maybe its just my stream, but the frame rate seems to be marginal at best.
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Adrian said 9:17PM on 6-04-2007
Looks a little sluggish and DirectX 8 but, wow! (Yes, it's OpenGL)
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Kol. Panic said 9:23PM on 6-04-2007
It's a little blurry, but it looks like the system in the video has a Battery Status item in the menu bar, which would imply to me that it is indeed a portable.
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Joshua Ochs said 10:00PM on 6-04-2007
I think the fact that it's running AT ALL is an amazing accomplishment. Quake 4 is, after all, one of the most demanding games out there right now.
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wayne said 9:53PM on 6-04-2007
I just want full mobile device syncing to work such as with blackberry pearl and 8703e
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scott said 10:10PM on 6-04-2007
The sluggishness is likely the screen-capture program theyre using, on most compy's capturing the whole screen at a time can have an output of only like 12fps...
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Tom said 10:35PM on 6-04-2007
Yeah, I say kudos to them getting it running at all. Granted it's not super fast, but hell, it's playable. And yes, Q4 is pretty demanding. Think of all the moderately older midrange/older games we can now (or soon will be able to) play on our computers! Star Trek Armada! Star Wars Battlefront II! Half Life 1! Morrowind! Okay, maybe not Morrowind. But if Q4 can run, Morrowind should be at least playable. I just hope he's not running that on some super-upgraded Mac Pro or something. I'd like it to be able to run on my MBP.
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Quine said 11:09PM on 6-04-2007
it looks to me like the screen capuring program is suffering from lag, because the player keeps moving even when it appears to lag, making it look less like the game is skipping and more like the screen is. That's me though. Of course, it'll be a lot better in the full version than the beta too. Can't wait!
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schlomo said 11:19PM on 6-04-2007
hmm... looks iffy at this stage. just things I can pick out from the vid:
is that 800x600 res? is there no fullscreen support or is the virtualization just THAT taxing on system resources?
there's no bump mapping/normal mapping to be seen in that video - can they not take advantage of hardware T&L yet? I mean, they've only got a few video cards to work with.
I'd like to see an A-B of q4 on the mac and in parallels to see the difference. looks like, for now, the hardware 3D support is only marginally better than software support in the overall scheme of things. while hardware support at all is very nice to see, from the looks of the video it seems as though they're only harnessing 20% of the power in that card, if that (depending on the specs of the MBP).
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Ben @ Parallels said 11:52PM on 6-04-2007
Yes, this was shot on my MacBook Pro. And yes, its a bit choppy from the capture software. Find me at WWDC and I'll show you how fast it runs in person!
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Peter Payne said 11:31PM on 6-04-2007
So what, OpenGL programs will work well, but DirectX may not work as well?
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Jon H said 1:13AM on 6-05-2007
I want to see Marvel: Ultimate Alliance running in it. That's the only game I'm interested in. Why? It's got MODOK, that's why. Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing. What more do you need in a game?
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Jon H said 1:13AM on 6-05-2007
"is that 800x600 res? is there no fullscreen support or is the virtualization just THAT taxing on system resources?"
Um, at a guess, they did it in a window in order to demonstrate that it's running in Parallels.
if they showed it full-screen, it could be faked, and actually be running in BootCamp.
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Elliot said 2:38AM on 6-05-2007
I don't know, man. Parallels is cool and all, but for gaming, I'll just stick with boot camp. The 3 minutes it takes to reboot pales in comparison to the hours I waste playing a game once Windows launches...
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Andy said 11:36AM on 6-05-2007
i'm pre-ordering now!... this looks great
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schlomo said 12:04PM on 6-05-2007
"Um, at a guess, they did it in a window in order to demonstrate that it's running in Parallels."
they could have run it in a higher-res window. 800x600 is just unacceptable, and the game sets the res, not parallels (from what I can see in the video) - so that, coupled with the lack of certain T&L effects, tells me that either the video card is very underutilised or the virtualization itself is very taxing on system resources
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