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Gaming with Boot Camp
- Thread starter Krim911
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You are either in all OSX or all Windows with Bootcamp setup. The OS gets ALL of the processing and RAM. What I mean is that you boot Windows OR OSX, not both. Thus the OS (either) has use of the full processor and ALL of the RAM, it is NOT partitioned. You just partition the hard drive. I gave it 100GB of space but I put in a 500GB drive.
You don't (and can't) partition the RAM for Boot Camp. Boot Camp uses the entire computer as a Windows or Mac OS machine, depending on which operating systm you boot into, and you have to reboot to switch between them. Windows and Mac OS don't run at the same time.
For the hard drive, you'll need to make the Windows partition big enough to fit Windows itself plus any software / games you want to install, plus some extra free space for virtual memory. Same for the Mac OS partition.
The only thing you partition is the hard drive, when you boot into OSX or Windows it uses 100% of the computers resources. Nothing else is split.
What I think you're getting confused with is Parallels. With that you can (painfully and excruciatingly) run Windows within OSX whilst sharing the resources.
What I think you're getting confused with is Parallels. With that you can (painfully and excruciatingly) run Windows within OSX whilst sharing the resources.
Doesn't matter. It still isn't accessing the hardware directly, natively.
If your gaming with newer games and need the frames, then use
bootcamp. If you playing "Popcap" games, then by all means use a
virtual machine.
You could give your VM as much ram as you want. it still won't access
the hardware directly. It's emulated.
depends how much RAM is in your machine... usually you want at least 1gb... i use 1.5gb with 4gb in my machine. on 8gb machines I usually use 3gb.
VMware 3 runs games better than some people give it credit for, its 3D rendering is not that bad for some older and lower graphics games.
the 3D rendering is not totally emulated (though mostly it still is), as it uses Wine code, which translates and calls to native local OpenGL that has direct access to your graphics.
Using Boot Camp I gave half of my hard drive space on my MBP to Windows. As I had a smallish hard drive that was about 100GB. Then I went out and purchased a portable drive, one of those itty bitty 250GB USB drives (like this). I store my Windows games on there. I also have a 500GB version which I use for a Time Machine backup when in MacOSX.
I found it easiest to just use 2 hard drives in my Macbook Pro.
got my main drive a 500gb for OSX, and a secondary 320gb hard drive for Windows.... I never seem to run out of space this way.
I rarely use Windows, I really should cut that 320gb hard drive down to get some more space for OSX some day if I need it. All the Windows games I like to play right now have ways they work fine in OSX.
got my main drive a 500gb for OSX, and a secondary 320gb hard drive for Windows.... I never seem to run out of space this way.
I rarely use Windows, I really should cut that 320gb hard drive down to get some more space for OSX some day if I need it. All the Windows games I like to play right now have ways they work fine in OSX.
Virtualization is not emulation. Try comparing VirtualPC on an old PowerPC machine to VMware or Parallels and it'll be immediately clear that virtualization is far superior to emulation. 3D graphics in a VM are somewhat hairy, but as far as simpler resources like RAM and CPU are concerned, the VM is pretty much accessing hardware directly (in as much as any operating system does, i.e., a native Mac application doesn't access RAM 'directly' -- it only sees an abstraction of memory presented by the operating system).
As far as the question is concerned, on my machine with 4 gigs of RAM, I usually give 1.5 gigs to my Windows 7 VM.
I have a 250Gb MBP. I allocated 50Gb to the Windows side. I run Windows exclusively for gaming purposes only, and i usually have 2 games installed, which still takes up about 20-25Gb of the hard drive. Other stuff like music and videos are on the Mac side, as i still have access to them while in Boot Camp. Btw, even though my notebook has 4Gb ram, XP only uses <3Gb, but it's more than enough anyway. Playing DAO right now. Great game.
I've started Windows 7 with 2MB of graphics memory, and 256MB RAM. Give it as much RAM as you like, I'd say 4GB sounds fine. If you need more RAM just bump it up a little bit.
VRAM, go with more than 2MB, seriously the OS throws a hissy fit distorted images and colors and goes really slow!