Parallels Desktop 3.0 / Windows on a Mac

[opus13]

with a translation level thrown in the mix, what % decrease in performance for video accelerated apps is to be expected? 50% 30%?

[Per-Anders]

According to the website it runs at "native speed", which would suggest no decrease but I'd sure like to see some benchmarks on this, it is however virtualisation, not emulation, so there's no real reason it couldn't operate at full speed.

[Bonedaddy]

It's actually plenty fast. If it's not native speed, it's damn close. The problem lies more with the fact that you're basically running two OSes at the same time, and have to pay for both with RAM and disk space. But since Parallels works fine side-by-side with Bootcamp, if you wanted to really use all the resources in your system, you could boot in Windows.

I use it all the time, and it's pretty friggin handy to be able to switch to Windows on the fly. I've been making some websites lately, and I'm so glad I can use just use one machine for all my browser compatibility testing.

[mech7]

Yeah sounds great.. i think especially when you use a stripped down version of XP.. i made one for my old granpa's pc it was only 128 and took around 30 mb ram.. then it would not even really matter anymore running 2 os at the same time :D

[Lone Deranger]

I tried an earlier version of Parallels to test out ZB3 under OSX on my Mac Pro. It all worked flawlessly, but I found the 3D speed to be rather dissapointing. Couldn't get even close to the speeds Pixologic were advertising. Might try this latest version to test how much things have improved...

[Stevemoh]

Definitely a move in the right direction, but I'm not selling my PC just yet.

[daytona]

As an alternative this looks like it will bereally cool when it gets released - http://www.viralvideochart.com/youtube/unity_in_vmware_fusion_for_mac_os_x?id=JIApJMzGzDQ

[Aneks]

anyone have any experience/stories about running anything demmanding through this like Fusion or XSI ?

Adobe just got on board the intel train, so I am trying to avoid ever having to reboot my machine into windows again if possible !

t

[harlan_hill]

Of course it would be much nicer if Softimage got their heads out of their asses and ported XSI to OSX.

[gent_k]

Of course it would be much nicer if Softimage got their heads out of their asses and ported XSI to OSX.

uhm... yes... and that's a trivial decision to make according to you!?

Decide to dedicate up to 30-40% of your developer hours to porting to another OS, while you could spend those on further improving the software for your existing users. Plus when the port is done, it will permanently increase the time it takes to finish new versions of the software just due to the fact that you have to support more operating systems.

This would mean that for let's say 2 years that it takes to develop the OSX version there would have to be 'less impressive' XSI 6.5 or 7 versions due to the less time that can be spent on new stuff. It would fall behind on development speed compared to other apps for these 2-3 years, and that could be a 'life or death' situation in a way for XSI.

Autodesk can get away with a few unimpressive major releases due to the market share Maya and Max has, but I do not think Softimage has that luxury at this point in time.

Not such a trivial decision to make is it!?

[harlan_hill]

Whatever man. I'm not sure why you feel compelled to share your vast knowledge of software development and the inner workings of the Softimage development team & resources, but I'm not here to argue. It was a comment, lighten up.

Softimage certainly found the time & resources to port over to Linux, and their parent company has found the time & resources to port a large portion of their other products over to the Mac (and in some cases to Linux as well). I realize that the Softimage team is different, separate, yadda yadda, but that really isn't the point. Alias managed to port Maya over just fine as have a variety of other companies.

No one said anything about it being "trivial" - well... no one but you.

[fahr]

If XSI was on MacOSX, I would seriously consider switching my Maya-based studio to XSI. But it's not. So I won't. I hope Avid reconsiders snubbing the Mac market someday soon.

[Per-Anders]

I tried an earlier version of Parallels to test out ZB3 under OSX on my Mac Pro. It all worked flawlessly, but I found the 3D speed to be rather dissapointing. Couldn't get even close to the speeds Pixologic were advertising. Might try this latest version to test how much things have improved...

Unfortunately you're unlikely to get any speedup, Z-Brush uses software shading for it's viewports. The biggest factor in speed there is processor and screen-size. I use a 1600x1200 screen with Z3 and all's well, however I have heard that some people have difficulty if they have a larger screen, the speed dropping a lot. Also turning off shadows will provide a significant speedup. One other thing, the coherance mode in Parallels really slows it down a lot, if you use fullscreen or windowed you get far better performance in my experience.

[tuna]

Whatever man. I'm not sure why you feel compelled to share your vast knowledge of software development and the inner workings of the Softimage development team & resources, but I'm not here to argue. It was a comment, lighten up.

Softimage certainly found the time & resources to port over to Linux, and their parent company has found the time & resources to port a large portion of their other products over to the Mac (and in some cases to Linux as well). I realize that the Softimage team is different, separate, yadda yadda, but that really isn't the point. Alias managed to port Maya over just fine as have a variety of other companies.

No one said anything about it being "trivial" - well... no one but you.


Your earlier reply certainly contended that porting XSI to OSX was trivial. Saying Softimage have their "heads up their asses" and are simply twiddling their thumbs inbetween releases or are too cool for OSX is completely not true.

Porting to OSX is a huge task and will indeed cost a lot of money and effort that could be used more usefully in developing XSI itself for the platforms already available. Dismissing gent_k's reply like you did was very rude. How dare he use logic and reason to explain why. You totally got him with "Whatever man" and the rest of your irrelivant and dismissively obnoxious reply.

I think everyone (even Softimage) would like XSI to be available on all sorts of platforms, but as to if and when they do this, it depends on a lot of circumstances. Some of which have been explained before by SI staff. If you're interested in finding out why, the reasons aren't too hard to find.

[Howitzer]

Now that there is Parallels 3, I'm sure there is even less of an incentive to port Softimage.

[L.Rawlins]

Now that there is Parallels 3, I'm sure there is even less of an incentive to port Softimage.

Does anyone else pronounce it the French way?

'Soft-im-arge'.

I have no idea why I do that, force of habit I guess, but it sounds far more luxurious a product when I do. :D

[Bonedaddy]

Does anyone else pronounce it the French way?

'Soft-im-arge'.

I have no idea why I do that, force of habit I guess, but it sounds far more luxurious a product when I do. :D

Well, it's a Canadian company, I think that's how it's supposed to be pronounced.

[lazzhar]

Does anyone else pronounce it the French way?

'Soft-im-arge'.

:D
LOL, why the '"r" there?

[Roger Eberhart]

anyone have any experience/stories about running anything demmanding through this like Fusion or XSI ?

Adobe just got on board the intel train, so I am trying to avoid ever having to reboot my machine into windows again if possible !

t

I tried running Max 9 on it. It only worked with software display mode. DirectX gave me blank viewports. OpenGL crashed immediately. Guess I'll be keeping that Bootcamp partition handy.

[BUZZFX]

I thought of installing Parallels 3 but after seeing all of the complaints on their forum regarding bugs etc., I'm a little hesitant.

[rekh]

I couldn't resist...

I'm currently teaching myself Cinema 4D and Animation Master. I've always wanted to play around with XSI.

I have no experience with XSI on a PC, but I will say it renders faster than Animation Master running natively on my Intel mac duo core; 2 ghz w/ 1 gig of ram...


splash screen:

http://www.daathrekh.com/news_source/xsi-1.jpg

And I'm in:

http://www.daathrekh.com/news_source/xsi-2.jpg

[robinteo]

Hey wow, thanks for posting the XSI running using Parallels. I've been wondering how well it will work. Have you done any work on it yet? ie. modeling, rendering or animatiing. Some guy recommended installing it on Linux under OS X and it worked. Only advantage is that you don't have to pay for Windows OS.

[rekh]

Hey wow, thanks for posting the XSI running using Parallels. I've been wondering how well it will work. Have you done any work on it yet? ie. modeling, rendering or animatiing. Some guy recommended installing it on Linux under OS X and it worked. Only advantage is that you don't have to pay for Windows OS.

Greetings,

I did very little rendering...used a few of the scenes that came with the application. I wanted mostly to check how it handled. I felt no "drag" when moving objects around; resizing primitives, etc. Having used Cinema 4D, Lightwave, and Carrara, XSI is taking some getting used to. But like all things, the more you do it, the more it becomes second nature.

I was able to display the various scenes that came with the program in shader mode w/o any problems. The program loads fast; faster than Maya.

I could not render some of the larger scenes. The error message I received was one of missing files/plugins. Mind you, I installed the demo for both XSI and Parallel. I may have installed XSI in the wrong place. The Windows environment (C, D, etc) is totally alien to me so I had no idea as to where to put XSI. I had to try about 3 times before it finally installed...user error though. Like 99% of us working folks, I use a PC at work but we are blocked from installing software on it.

On the next OS update, I will probably purchase XSI and use it under bootcamp; though I'm willing to bet Parallel will be even better by the the time leopard emerges. It is my hope that someone who is more familiar with Windows and XSI, test drives XSI under Parallels and really give softimage a test run because this program definatly works under Parallels!

[Fredl]

Is Parallels able to use multiprocessors yet?

Virtualization is really getting better all the time, without any of the overheads of emulation.

An alternate way to run XSI on a Mac is to install OS X along side Linux on the main internal hard drive. Then at start-up you can select which OS you want. Or even tri-boot: OS X, Windows, Linux.

[robinteo]

Hi Rekh, thanks for the followup, that's good details to know, appreciate that. :-)

Fredl, thanks for the insights on Linux with XSI on OS X. When I wrote to a sales representative in XSI about OS X version of XSI, he said right now he can't say whether they have plans but they do take our requests into consideration. He gave me this link on the XSI forum, some guy posted up XSI running on Linux on OS X,

http://www.xsibase.com/forum/index.php?board=9;action=display;threadid=27705;start=2

robin

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