G5 + Virtual PC 6 = gaming machine or no?

[RollWave]

How does virtual PC perform with games and what not versus a p4 or AMD? I dont really know anything about virtual PC and what its limitations are?

 

[spyordie007]

as far as I'm aware virtual PC does not allow for hardware video acceleration which would immediatly make it a bad platform for games.

-Spy

 

[gsaldivar]

Virtual PC attempts to create an "emulated" or "virtual" PC completely through software. Vital components of a PC that don't exist on a Mac's motherboard are instead recreated in RAM. The drawback is that running a "virtual" chip in RAM is much slower than using a real chip.

There is no 3D video acceleration, since it would make the emulator completely useless in terms of speed. Even the fastest Mac emulating a PC equipped with only a 4MB SIS (?) video card will be lucky to achieve Pentium II speeds. Real world performance of Virtual PC is closer to a midrange Pentium I computer.

So while you might be able to play a few games using Virtual PC, most modern games using any type of 3D images won't work at all. The few games that do work, will run at a completely unusable (slow) speed.

Hope this helps!

 

[mantrasia]

hows the performance of running windows based applications thru virtual PC? i have an 700mhz ibook that i need to run some financial software on, and it only works in windows environments....so i'm either going to have to try virtual pc 6 with windows XP ($200) or buy a PC based laptop to run my programs from ($1100)....i'm leaning towards the cheaper of the two obviously, but i dont want to throw my $200 away to find out the performance of the product wont be adequate.

thanks!
t

 

[Nothinman]

Doesn't VPC have a trial edition? I know VMWare does, but that doesn't help you as it's x86 only.

 

[mantrasia]

i dont think there's a trial version....i went thru the connetix site and didnt see anything offering to me to test...

thanks tho,
-t

 

[helpme]

It's pretty slow... I think on a 700 mhz Ibook it would be workable (Pentium 1 speeds), but you should have a bunch of ram available.