3D Gaming with Parallels
This weekend I tried out the new Parallels 3.0 and Hitman: Codename 47. I remember back when I bought my first computer this was the first game I played on it. It was a 800MHz Pentium III with some onboard video card (maybe 16MBs VRAM). After hearing about the 3D graphics capabilities Parallels was building into version 3.0 I was more then excited to get my hands on a copy to try it out. Unfortunately my version 2.x license didn’t carry over to version 3 so I am using the free 15 day trial at the moment. I used Windows XP Professional SP2 and a MacBook 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo with 768MBs of RAM for the Parallels virtual machine. I used OpenGL as my graphics setting in the game and a 1024×768 resolution.
Being that the system requirements for Hitman: Codename 47 were, Pentium III or Athlon, 128 MB hard-disk space, and 32 MB DirectX-compliant video card, this game definitely wasn’t going to be pushing the MacBooks system limits but it was worth trying out just to see how the new Parallels worked.
After installing the game and configuring my keys to the appropriate actions (walk, run, left, right, etc…) I was playing! It was very smooth and worked perfectly! I even ran it in the Coherence mode and that too worked great. The only issue I noticed was when characters were speaking, they would speak fast and sometimes they didn’t say everything, it would get cut off. The cut-scenes and all the game play was fluid, and it didn’t seem to stutter at all.
I am very impressed with the new 3D graphics feature. I will be trying out more resource intensive games in the near future like the other Hitman games.