I'm about to buy a new Mac Pro with the optional ATI Radeon X1900 XT graphics card. I'm studying the downloaded latest User Guide.pdf, but can't find so far answers to some of my questions. Does Parallels Desktop for Mac support this card natively, using the appropriate driver? Related question: will there be any problem with a DVI monitor, or with multiple monitors? Many thanks, Steve
I could be wrong, but there's not much in Parallels right now that would care what graphics card you have installed. There is no hardware acceleration from within any guest OS running on the VM, for example. Parallels ends up just being another windowed application on your desktop. If you prefer can take up your whole screen. But it's doing this all within the normal OS X windowing boundaries. So, having a DVI monitor and the X1900 myself, I can definitively say that it works just fine with one. I certainly think it runs with multiple monitors, although only having one myself, I don't know what its behavior is running full-screen in that mode (i.e., whether it spans both monitors or just takes up one screen).
A VM within Parallels sees an emulated video card. Regardless of your real hardware, a VM will see a non-accelerated, non-3d accelerated, non-directx complient, non-opengl, video card that supports any resolution your Mac can. This video card never actually existed as older video cards actually did not support higher resolutions, so some OS's may get confused by it. Windows supports it fine, but forget about 3d apps.
Thanks to all of you for the answers [that was a rather dumb question I asked!] Are there any benchmarks run on a Mac Pro that give an indication of the 2D performance manipulating bit maps [not polygon rendering]? I need to run MaxSea [electronic charting] which does complete screen redraws for every update - e.g., zoom, pan, ... A 2.7Ghz Dell Inspiron, driving a 22" Cinema Display via a Margi DVI PC-card interface is painfully slow at 1600x1024, 16bit.
