Playing games on OSX, Bootcamp, parallels or Fusion?

Si. · 4 Mar 2013 at 14:30

I fancy getting a few games on my Mac but options for Mac games are limited, has anyone had any luck using Fusion or Parallels for game playing? or is bootcamp the only option?

eatcustard · 4 Mar 2013 at 14:51

Bootcamp is by far the best.
I cant play anything decent in Parallels

ic1male · 4 Mar 2013 at 15:14

There's a growing library on Steam of Mac titles now but otherwise you should reboot into Boot Camp.

Gilbert89 · 4 Mar 2013 at 15:45

Bootcamp + Steam = Best bet at the moment

pingwing · 4 Mar 2013 at 16:28

Steam account, have a look what on mac (there are plenty of decent things now).

Want something windows only, get windows and bootcamp it as that's not too much trouble to do really.

Would really avoid emulation in osx, just a bit flakey most the time when just having windows to boot into or playing natively in osx is more sensible.

lamboman · 4 Mar 2013 at 21:06

Without a doubt Boot Camp. Source engine runs like crap on the Mac, even to this day.

ic1male · 4 Mar 2013 at 21:27

lamboman said:
Without a doubt Boot Camp. Source engine runs like crap on the Mac, even to this day.

Interesting. Does it run "like crap" on Linux too?

Si. · 4 Mar 2013 at 23:01

OK.. thanks guys. I better clear some space from my boot drive and get windows installed.

xxalxx · 5 Mar 2013 at 03:03

lamboman said:
Without a doubt Boot Camp. Source engine runs like crap on the Mac, even to this day.

I play cs:go and tf2 on my mac at native rez absolutely fine

lamboman · 5 Mar 2013 at 09:38

ic1male said:
Interesting. Does it run "like crap" on Linux too?

Quite possibly. Not sure though.

xxalxx said:
I play cs:go and tf2 on my mac at native rez absolutely fine

Run them under Windows, you may find your frame rates increase massively. I've found I get significantly less lag as well. This isn't a fluke with one configuration either - on both my old 2011 iMac and my current 2012, same result.

annaharris · 1 Apr 2013 at 13:46

I know about Bootcamp.It is quite better than other.

rsatd · 2 Apr 2013 at 09:22

Using bootcamp here, works really well. Especially when you can set up mac to re-open all windows on coming back to it. Tried using cedega like thing, but it stopped working after a while q_q...

Vanquish-Storm · 2 Apr 2013 at 11:02

Will bootcamp work with windows 8?

PaulyD · 2 Apr 2013 at 11:25

Yep, its recently been updated with 10.8.3 to allow windows 8 to work

FreeStream · 4 Apr 2013 at 10:10

Sims 3 plays surprisingly well on my Mac Pro with 6870 in VMware Fusion.

2560x1440, max settings gives 30-60fps but AA kills it so I reboot into windows so I can have some decent AA.

I'd say performance in fusion is 50% or better than the performance in windows itself.

ninja2000 · 5 Apr 2013 at 11:16

I found fusion 5 quite poor for gaming. I found parallels 7 the best, 8 is supposed to be better but I got a lot of graphical disruption in games.

I just play light games in parallels (SC2, DOTA2, WEE) and bootcamp for AA3 and BF3

Skyboat · 5 Apr 2013 at 12:20

ninja2000 said:
I found fusion 5 quite poor for gaming. I found parallels 7 the best, 8 is supposed to be better but I got a lot of graphical disruption in games.

I just play light games in parallels (SC2, DOTA2, WEE) and bootcamp for AA3 and BF3

Does SC2 (I assume StarCraft II) really run that badly in OS X?

DodgeeRascal · 5 Apr 2013 at 14:14

Skyboat said:
Does SC2 (I assume StarCraft II) really run that badly in OS X?

Running SC2 on my mid-2012 MBP on OSX and it runs fine for me.

ikillbears · 5 Apr 2013 at 14:48

Source and SC2 running absolutely perfectly fine here

ninja2000 · 5 Apr 2013 at 15:20

Skyboat said:
Does SC2 (I assume StarCraft II) really run that badly in OS X?

No not at all. But I don't want to have it installed in OSX and Bootcamp. Therefore I install it in bootcamp and play it via parallels or bootcamp itself