Does World of Warcraft Work?

I was wondering if the game World of Warcraft works with this VM software.

Thank you

 

Hello saiello,

What are your "World of Warcraft" system requirements? If they include DirectX® 8.0 graphics technology, the game will work. However DirectX® 9.0 is not supported by Parallels Desktop 3.0. This issue will be eliminated in the future version.

Best regards,
Xenos

 

False advertising?

In the screenshots and demos, there is a shot of WoW running through Parallels desktop. However, when trying to run it, WoW states a need for DirectX 9.0c, which you are saying desktop doesn't support.

What's going on here?

Edit: Installed DirectX 10, then found an option in the video configuration section of the virtual machine that allowed me to enable directX support, and now WoW does load (though I haven't fully patched it yet to see if it actually *works* in any reasonable sense of the word). Will update later.

 

Try setting it to use OpenGL, most of the games that Parallels lists as supported have an OpenGL mode.

 

OK, I'll check that out.

In the meantime, I got everything loaded and running with directX. On my first try I got ~ 3 fps. So, I played a bit with the PD memory settings (allocating 1 gig, won't seem to go higher even though I have 2 gig on the mac itself). First it complained that I need to turn on pre-allocation of virtual memory, which I did, then it just complained that it cannot allocate that much memory (anything over 1 gig).

With it set to 1 gig, I am able to pull about 10-12 fps. I read that directX will not be affected by the setting of the video memory, and I found this to be true as settings of 16 MB or 64 MB seemed to make no difference.

This may be the best that a virtual machine can pull, but it is far from what I was hoping for. With similar hardware, running the game natively, I'm able to pull 80+ fps easily.

Are there any other tricks or settings that are not obvious (to me)? I will try openGL out a bit later tonight and see if that gives any improvement.

Oh, also, turning down the video settings from within the game (to minimum) seemed to make no differences; if anything, it seemed to make things run slower. However, switching into full screen mode (in PD) and back out seemed to increase the frame rate from ~10 to ~15. Odd.

 

just curious... why would you want to run this in Parallels when it runs natively in OS X?

 

Because I have several apps that do not have a Mac version, and WoW is an app that I know the performance of very well, that I can use as a benchmark to test Parallels' abilities within my 15-day trial period.

Sadly, I have to say that I have not been able to get any more than 10 fps out of WoW, either with DirectX or OpenGL (assuming that throwing -opengl on the end of the command line causes wow to go to opengl, as some other websites would have you believe).

My thinking is that parallels is just not able to harness the horsepower of the video card, and so is completely unsuitable for use with applications requiring intensive 3D.

Has anyone had more success under Desktop than I have, that could give some advice?

 

Unfortunately the performance of Parallels 3D support will be very difficult to benchmark, as depending on how each particular game's 3D engine works the results will be completely different. Some games run smoothly and others don't, it just depends on specifically which game you plan to run, and not just how GPU intensive the game is. 3D performance is better than that of Fusion in all cases that I have seen, but Mac OS X Leopard's Boot Camp feature is really the way to go if you want to do PC gaming on your Mac.