Quake 3 - mac vs vmware xp

SooTyLaD

SooTyLaD

SooTyLaD

Soldato
Joined
19 Oct 2002
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hey guys...

just though i'd post some findings that may be of interest... i wanted to test if the statements that the efficiency of VMware is in the high 90s compared to a non-emulated/bootcamp setup...

i am yet to test quake 3 on a bootcamp platform, that will come later but if anyone wants to run a 1680x1050 timedemo that'd be great :)

anyway... in 1680x1050, with all settings maxed, my macbook pulls of 52fps, which i'm quite happy with considering its just onboard graphics... when i ran the same test within vmware (win xp sp2), the stated fps was 32 although it seemed a LOT worse than running straight on OS X.

all in all, i think vmware is great for running those little apps that you miss and IE for browser testing etc... but i dont thinks its suitable for gaming... maybe just something like starcraft but since its mac compatible, you never would...

i was kinda hoping that the vmware quake 3 would be comparable to the mac one... ahh well would have been too good to be true :)

this is all of course relatively hypothetical since no one ever intended macbooks for games... but i like to test capabilities anyway ;)
 
I hate the phrase "oh well, macs aren't for games"

I run quake 3 fine on my MBP, native, and never drop below 125fps (like my old PC did). Boot Camp would probably yield similar results to native os x.
 
He wasnt saying that all mac's arent for games, rather the macbook (which lets face it with a integrated gpu, it wasn't designed for games)
 
well like i said, it was reported as 32 but it didn't look anything like that... it was actually running noticeably slower than real time...

i have just ran age of empires 2 on the vmware... and surprisingly enough that is also unplayable :( - if i wanna play that i guess its a case of buying the mac version...

just posting my findings really for people who were thinking of running games through an emulated version of windows... if aint really possible... i'm guessing boot camp would do a decent job but i havn't tried yet...
 
Hate said:
I hate the phrase "oh well, macs aren't for games"

I run quake 3 fine on my MBP, native, and never drop below 125fps (like my old PC did). Boot Camp would probably yield similar results to native os x.
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You're aware of how old Quake 3 is ...right? ;)

Macs aren't for the best choice for games, sure you can run some older ones but they are far from the reasons people buy Macs.
 
QuiKsiLVeR said:
i have just ran age of empires 2 on the vmware... and surprisingly enough that is also unplayable :( - if i wanna play that i guess its a case of buying the mac version...
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You should be able to run Age of Empires 2 with it easily (I have, atleast with a Windows host). Do you have all the VMWare drivers installed correctly?

As others have said you won't have a chance of running any 3d games under VMWare, for starters the basic svga card they emulate doesn't support any form of 3d acceleration. You should be able to play pretty much any 2d game however (Doom... most old RTS's Command & Conquer works well). I use it to play Red Alert over a network since they have dropped support for IPX network support from the latest versions of Windows.
 
andshrew said:
You should be able to run Age of Empires 2 with it easily (I have, atleast with a Windows host). Do you have all the VMWare drivers installed correctly?
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I have no idea mate vmware took care of all of that??

maybe i'll try giving it more ram it was using a gig... but yeah i found it strange that it didn't run smoothly...
 
QuiKsiLVeR said:
I have no idea mate vmware took care of all of that??

maybe i'll try giving it more ram it was using a gig... but yeah i found it strange that it didn't run smoothly...
Click to expand...

The drivers should install automatically however it might not have had the VM tools installed which may improve performance, there should be an option from the VM menu to install them. Do you have hardware virtualization enabled from the VM's settings?

Setting it to use a gig of ram should be more than enough so I don't think adding more will make any difference.
 
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