Parallels just released a new version the other day that finally has some sort of 3D Acceleration support. They've proven that it'll run games like HalfLife2 and Quake 4 without a hitch and seems to run fairly well..


I later found out exactly how this was being accomplished; they have somehow converted all the DirectX calls (8.1) into OpenGL commands, so the Mac will recognize it.


So, naturally I have installed AC just to see what would happen. I figure it's an older game, though now based on DirectX 9, it'll run on older, non v9 hardware (as the gfx card simulated is only good for 8.1)


AC by itself seems to run fine. I can change screen resolutions, run around, resize chat windows, whatever. It does seem to act flaky when you go into windowed mode; ie. the button zones get off-sync from the graphic interface. It's taken a little bit of tweaking, but it still seems to work OK.


The next step was to install Decal and a few plugins. This is where things got interesting. Right out of the install with Decal.. AC would launch, but upon entering the world the graphic interface was shot all to hell. I figured "OK, I should have expected that." With all the DirectX/AC hacking involved in this, it wasn't much of a surprise. I tried to enable the "Alternate Injection Method" (what does this do, anyway?) and it actually loaded AC with the Decal bar, and loaded my plugins as well. However, it forced everything to an 800x600 resolution. Upon trying to change the resolution (while IG and through the Userprefs file) it would bomb out.


So, it's been an interesting test. AC seems to run decent IG without Decal with a virtuallized DirectX 8.1 video card (at ~64meg vram as well, that's the most I could assign to it). It get skippy in MP with all the bots a little bit and the graphics broke up & turned everything white, and out in the world some (but so does my desktop) But I felt it ran fairly well, being I had 2 OS's loaded with one being in a virtual machine with a game loaded.


Machine Specs:

Core 2 Duo @ 2.33ghz

2gig ram (1gig assigned to XP)

ATI Radeon x1600 PCIx 256meg Video


Maybe one day I'll setup Bootcamp and dual boot it =)


I just figured I would post this little experiment for those interested. Might try it with Vista later on, I'd venture to say that would probably be worse though.


C

 

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Thanks for the update!

 

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