boot camp vs parallels

[hwp16]

Morning MacRumors,

My first thread here, please be gentle!

Have just taken delivery of my LOVELY 27" iMac, the base 2.7ghz model, it is making me very happy.

One question though - i am interested in playing some games on this beauty. I am a regular console gamer so will be playing all the heavy crysis 2s, skyrims etc on my 360 and ps3 in the future (Kanex need to hurry up with their new adapter!). The games i do want to play on the iMac are things like Civ 5, the games you simply don't get on consoles.

The way I see it I've got three options:
1. Buy the OSX version. Now with Civ 5 i know that with 2560x1440 resolution, one 1/5 of the screen turns gray, so it would have to be at 1080, which is slightly upsetting with this screen - but what settings would i be able to get out of it?

2. Install Windows 7 on bootcamp. This will, i imagine be quickest. However, the reason i need windows 7 at all is the various applications my university use over their citrix system which don't play nice with mac. Productivity wise, I'd rather have windows and mac open at the same time, leading to...

3. Parallels/VMware. How will gaming through this be? Im still rocking the stock 4gig ram but will be kicking that up to 12 soon. Will it be possible to play games on settings as high as the mac/bootcamp method? Im guessing not.....

ideas? (sorry for the wall of text.......)

 

[Georgio]

Just go Win7 64 bit in Boot Camp and reboot into each at will, it only takes seconds anyways.

 

[Sunday Ironfoot]

Install as bootcamp, modern VM solutions (Parallels, Fusion etc.) can launch a bootcamp instance as a VM, so you can get best of both worlds: Boot native for games, launch as VM for when you quickly need to do something with one of your university's apps *

If you're going to buy VM software though, Parallels has much faster gaming performance than VMWare Fusion.

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* I don't have my iMac yet, I'm assuming this is possible based on their websites saying that they can launch bootcamp instances, can someone confirm this?

 

[Dresevski]

^^I was late

I'd say go with the bootcamp partition for your gaming needs. Then you can run parallels to access it and run your university's programs. It's the best of both worlds. Save yourself from restarting to do some silly tasks but restart when you need to focus on gaming.

4GB on my 07 MBP does everything well in parallels except solid modeling, which is a big task. So you should be fine and I think the general consensus is that 12GB is a nice number with which to start.