Parallels Coherence

Posted by: blitz

Parallels Coherence - 25/02/2007 22:51

Impressive. No Windows desktop. Parallels RC3. No support for Linux with Coherence but this is nicely done. Appears to have better USB support as well.
Posted by: TigerJimmy

Re: Parallels Coherence - 26/02/2007 01:42

That is just slick as hell. No more software emulation, either, correct? That's running naitive using a real Windows install & and Intel CPU? I'd like to know the performance penalty, but if this works well it pretty much eliminates any reason not to get a Mac.

Oh, and just open the "folder" to access the Windows desktop.
Posted by: andy

Re: Parallels Coherence - 26/02/2007 06:19

Or http://creativefriday.com/Parallels_Coherence.mp4 for those whose QuickTime browser plugin isn't working...
Posted by: andym

Re: Parallels Coherence - 26/02/2007 06:43

After reading about sein's experience with one of the late Betas I decided to give RC3 a try and I have to say I'm very impressed with Coherence, I've not done much with USB so I can't say wether that's improved or not. I don't know wether VMware are going to do something similar, but for me it's a no-brainer choosing Parallels. I've got Vista and Kubuntu running as VM's as well with excellent compatibility.
Posted by: sein

Re: Parallels Coherence - 26/02/2007 07:53

Quote:
I don't know wether VMware are going to do something similar

VMWare have Fusion which by many accounts is designed to leapfrog Parallels in terms of stability, features and performance. They already have internal builds which have fully accelerated 3D graphics, and the performance is said to be very good. At the moment they have DirectX 8 working and they are on the way to DX9 for a Windows Vista virtual machine that can have all the Aero effects turned on.

All very impressive sounding, but I haven't had a chance to try it for myself yet.

(edit) A video of it in action
Posted by: drakino

Re: Parallels Coherence - 26/02/2007 13:41

Quote:
VMWare have Fusion which by many accounts is designed to leapfrog Parallels in terms of stability, features and performance.


Fusion hasn't shown off a feature like Coherence yet, will be interesting to see if VMWare tries something similar. Parallels is also working on Direct3D support, so at this point it's a matter of what product does it better. One other feature I can think of that Parallels has that Fusion is missing right now is the ability to boot off the Windows partition on the disk. I know VMWare does this on other platforms, so this should be easy for them to add on Fusion.

The benefits of Fusion that I currently see is SMP support for the guest OS, and also 64 bit support. And lastly, compatibility with the other existing VMWare images out there.

For me, I'm waiting on one of them to release a non beta version that offers Direct X 9 support that is good enough to run games with very little slowdown compared to dual booting. The good thing is that competition seems to be enhancing Parallels already, so having 2 products out there should benefit all Mac VM users. It's good to see, since Microsoft bowed out of the Mac VM market by not attempting to make a VirtualPC product for the Intel Macs.
Posted by: drakino

Re: Parallels Coherence - 03/03/2007 05:18

VMware Fusion beta 2 is out, and the Parallels version with Coherence is out of beta.

Beta 2 includes Direct3D support up to 8.1, though they have some work to do to get it to Aero accelerating levels. I tried benchmarking it, 3DMark 2001 gave me a score of 2687 at 1024x768. A Pentium III 700 with a Radeon 32MB scores around 2600.
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: Parallels Coherence - 03/03/2007 12:53

These solutions will not get their graphics scores up to an acceptable level without the help of the graphics vendors and/or Apple unfortunately. There's just way too much private/unplublished content in the graphics area.

Bruno
Posted by: drakino

Re: Parallels Coherence - 04/03/2007 00:17

Quote:
These solutions will not get their graphics scores up to an acceptable level without the help of the graphics vendors and/or Apple unfortunately. There's just way too much private/unplublished content in the graphics area.


Thats what I had assumed they were doing, working with the vendors to do it well, similar to the Virtual PC 3 on the Mac supporting hardware acceleration via a PCI 3dfx card. But after seeing the results, it almost makes me think that VMware is just making a software rendering solution, and better ones already exist that could be plugged into these VMs.