How to activate 3-D Acceleration [Parallels]?

[BioCore]

Hi everyone,

I was testing out XP on my new Leopard OS using Bootcamp which worked fine and all the drivers worked perfectly. After testing out Bootcamp I thought of testing out Parallels and see how that worked out for me! So I downloaded the 15 day trial version and after installing it and emulating windows XP I noticed that my graphics card was unrecognized, so I could not activate 3-D Acceleraton nor could I try to play any games on my XP installation. I currently own a MacBook Pro and would like to know if anyone knows how I can activate or force my XP to recognize the nVidia driver card in Parallels?

Thanks,

 

[tersono]

Unless something has changed in the last couple of builds, Parallels does not support hardware 3D acceleration. You can't get it to use the NVidia drivers as there's an abstraction layer between XP and your hardware - Parallels (or VMWare, for that matter) only emulates the hardware.

VMWare Fusion does have limited 3D support, but it's still experimental and only works with a limited number of older games (it emulates partial DX9 support)

Essentially if you need hardware 3D accelleration, you need to use Boot Camp

 

[BioCore]

Tersono, thanks for that clear up! I read that parallels does support 3-D acceleration on their own website, but it seems they never said partially. oh well I don't mind then using Bootcamp as it is better than nothing! Thanks again man, saved me a lot of wasted searching time!

 

[brkirch]

You need to install Parallels Tools before 3D acceleration will work. And after you do that you may need to change the DirectX setting in the virtual machine configuration for games to work.

 

[user13]

In fact, Parallels has also got partial 3d support, just like Fusion. It supports some games, of course. There's a list of supported apps on their site.
They do not state what version of DX is supported, but some people say (on this forum) that they even ran Oblivion in windows via Parallels (of course, not playable, but it worked).
Just as it has been suggested install Parallels Tools.
And use Boot Camp for heavy gaming, it is better than any VM