i thought parallels virtualization takes over the open-gl/ graphics power from the os-x, thats why no graphics drivers were needed installing windows. no? so i'm curious about the 32mb graphics card limitation in the settings and if that means it is only 32mb or if it takes graphics card power over from os-x too... any ideas?
Mmm... It can't take it all over... You need memory to power OS X, which includes the app Parallels. Now, I don't know if that is a software limitation only, or if that is really all that is available to Parallels. But, I think that is an over-simplification to say that it just 'takes over the graphics card' and 'hence requires no driver'.
Parallels does not virtualize the graphics card at all. It emulates an old VESA video card. It does not utilize the GPU on the video card. Most of the video processing is done on the CPU. There is not support for graphics acceleration like Direct 3d or Open GL in the current release. Some form of graphics acceleration is supposed to be available in the next beta release. Given all that, there is really no need for more than 32mb of emulated graphics memory cause it's just used for resolution and bit depth. That 32mb comes from your system RAM, not your VRAM
Please excuse my ignorance on this issue, but are you saying Direct 3D will not work at all or that they will not be accelerated? I'm going to look into programming with the DirectX SDK this summer, and I don't know if the graphics card is the only thing that can do DirectX or if the CPU can run simple DirectX code just fine.
It will not work at all. Technically, it CAN be done in software mode (i.e. non-accelerated Direct3D) by the application-level support or with SwiftShader, but it will be far from useful.
