G5 Virtual PC - Page 2

I really like VPC 6.02 I use it on my macintosh for Windows 2000 stuff. I wish the Ethernet was faster than 10 mbit because I use it as a ghost server. Running Visual Studio 2003 EA on it is not too bad on a Dual 1.25. I hope that the G5 brings better performance right now it is a little pokey but it's not too bad.

Maybe Microsoft has a plan of getting rid of Mac OS software other than VPC and will make VPC a really good product. This way they can have one code base for Office and any other stuff that someone would want to run on the mac. I mean it does seem smart even if I hate those Microshaft bastards. Maybe there will only be one more version of MS Office for mac then everyone will need to run VPC to use MS products. If they do this they can get rid of the Mac BU well all but the VPC part.

The power of Bill commands you,... the power of Bill commands you...

Direct X is a COM dll. Just reimplement the code using something that was compiled for the PPC and ship a special version of windows with VPC that is all native x86 code except for the Driect X dll (and charge an extra $50). COM was meant for stuff like this. There is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON why you can't ship a version of windows that couldn't work in this way. One of the points of COM was abstracting the implementation of some code from the interface. The interface is platform independent so that the implementation can be platfrom dependent.

Also, OS X has a pretty rich graphics API that is hardware accelerated (Quartz Extreme). I would guess that a good portion of Direct X calls could simply be forwarded to their corresponding OS X calls.

The reason why MS wouldn't do it is that it is still a significant effort to port Direct X to OS X. That is alot of work, but at least you have the same video cards on the Mac side as on the PC side (actually, you only have Nvidia and ATI, so the Mac video card scene is simpler than the PC scene). I guess the question is how much effort does MS want to put into the Mac market for VPC? If MS shipped VPC witn native video drivers, then the software developers would probably cease to write code for Macs. How cunning is MS? I can see them doing this (and if I was MS, I would totally do it just to play with Apple), and as a PC user who wants a Mac, this would make it all to easy for me to make my next computer a Mac.

Out of curiousity (and the need for speed), what versions of VPC and Windows are people running? I need to eek out as much speed as possible to justify transitioning to OSX and VPC.

This would speed things up a little, but really it is fairly minor compared to the benefit of a native driver. Most of what the DirectX DLL does (when its not emulating a GPU) is pass information along to the device driver. A 3D driver does a fair bit of work, plus it talks to the hardware. This is what takes most of the time, and it is a published and reasonably well-understood interface that companies outside of Microsoft are already using. It is the perfect candidate for VPC acceleration, and is much more cost effective than rewriting parts of the OS (e.g. DirectX DLL), which would be the versioning & compatibility nightmare that AirSluf is talking about above.

I run Win98 on VPC6. It works OK, but it is not intended to replace a desktop PC. However, I expect VPC6 to mimic the performance of a 1.4 GHz PC on my dual G5. That will be more than adequate for my Windows-only applications.

I would be surprised if VPC could achieve that. The 970 (and thus Apple's G5) is optimized for bandwith and streaming oriented algorithms. This is where it excels. Emulated code is notoriously bad for branch prediction and thus extracts a serious penalty from heavily pipelined processors. This is one area where I don't have high hopes for the 970.

Speedy solitaire!

Seriously tho...AirSluf people like me are on a PowerBook. I am not going to nor can I afford a separate PC notebook to lug around. I assume everyone in this thread has their various needs for VPC. Considering what it does it's an incredible app. M$ could make it so much better though. But..there hasn't been a single update. Nary a mention of one. Hmm.

I agree Aquatic. I am using VPC 5 w/XP on a 600Mhz iBook. In OS9, it is usable, but in OSX it is worthless. I don't want to buy a second portable, nor will I accept buying one (or two) Windoze boxes. I think people are looking for a solution in one, portable, machine.

Ultimately, is there a solution (either currently, or expected) that provides a workable mobile solution in OSX?

Kickaha and Amorph couldn't moderate themselves out of a paper bag. Abdicate responsibility and succumb to idiocy. Two years of letting a member make personal attacks against others, then stepping aside when someone won't put up with it. Not only that but go ahead and shut down my posting priviledges but not the one making the attacks. Not even the common decency to abide by their warning (afer three days of absorbing personal attacks with no mods in sight), just shut my posting down and then say it might happen later if a certian line is crossed. Bullshit flag is flying, I won't abide by lying and coddling of liars who go off-site, create accounts differing in a single letter from my handle with the express purpose to decieve and then claim here that I did it. Everyone be warned, kim kap sol is a lying, deceitful poster.

Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.

Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.

Yes you are right. I agree. That was definitely the case with Connectix. But now Microsoft, one of the largest companies on the planet, owns VPC.

Consider what they could do. They could make VPC so good it would hurt Apple. This is how they work. It's how I play monopoly too. I go overboard and mortgage everything to be able to buy lots of property, then I take over the market (or get hotels on the board.) This is what they did with XBox. nintendo and sony are in trouble. Look at all the cool exclusive games they are getting. No perfect dark for gamecube for me. Same with that new star wars game.

First off, the only thing that is going to substaintially improve VPC's performance is a faster host processor. As for Ninetendo and Sony, they are doing just fine, thank you. M$ is dumping millions of your Windows and Office $'s into the Xbox to prop it up. I have said it before and I will say it here. Sony will introduce the PS3 before the Xbox ever sees a profit. I expect the Xbox never to see a profit.

Nintendo has great product and the fans are just as hardcore as Apple's but I feel sorry for them. Microsoft gets what it wants. It will use money, the DoJ, pressure on other companies, etc to kick Nintendo in the balls and make them a niche player just like Apple. They'll turn into the next Sega. M$ wants the XBox to be the home entertainment hub and they have the money to make it happen. Sony might be big enough to weather the storm but not Nintendo. Resistance is futile.

However they could use the same technique to make VPC good through R&D into ideas like Programmer has mentioned and this could either be good or bad for Apple, we shall see how the games goes. I just want to know if something is going happen either way soon. A press announcement from M$MacBU would be nice.

The game console market is fundamentally different than the personal computer market. All of the advantages that M$ enjoys in the computer market are in the possession of the competition here. Personal computer users often have to use M$ products because their customers, colleagues, and vendors use the same M$ products. That is not true here. A gamer may buy the latest and greatest today. However, if a better console from a different vendor enters the market one month later, there is nothing to stop his brother from buying the new product. A large percentage of personal computer users have their computing choices made for them by IT staff. Game consoles are sold on an individual basis.

The bottom line is this: There are legitimate economic causes for much of Microsoft's dominance in the personal computer market. Virtually none of those circumstances exist in the game console market. Therefore, it will be virtually impossible for M$ to leverage its position in this market into the kind of long-term dominance it has enjoyed in the personal computer market.

Moving to Software...

Nintendo currently has the #1 console system. Sony the #2. Microsoft is a distant third, and people have been saying the Xbox is going to take over the market since it was introduced. It hasn't. Microsoft has proven a number of times that they can't dominate other fields the way they do the OS, and Office fields. Name one other Microsoft product with a monopoly? SQL server? It's 3rd in the database market I believe. IIS? Apache is killing it. Windows CE? Linux and Java are big in the embedded market... .NET? Hasn't taken off anywhere near the way Microsoft would like and Java is doing a lot of the things Microsoft said you could only get from .NET. IE? Only because it comes pre-installed with Windows. When Windows starts shipping with an included Xbox, then maybe Xbox will become dominant.

VPC 2.0 had Voodoo2 support.

Yea...

Phhp! Who needs windows when you have all the software you could ever need for Macintosh. Well, not every single thing, but most. And if we all start using only Mac software, the windows developers will all switch to Macintosh and the world will be a better place! Lol, Just kidding. I dont want to hurt any of you windows lover's feelings out there. It would be nice though!

I need to jump in here and call BS. I personally know several Connectix and ex-Connectix employees. Believe me, they're not dumb. At all. In fact, most people describe them as "brilliant" or "rocket scientists."

Whether or not their software runs they way you want or has the features you want is another issue entirely.

Don't imply that they're stupid unless you actually know them personally. It's not fair to them, and in this case your implication happens to be flat-out wrong.

VPC is already capable of executing x86 code at around 60% of the host's CPU speed. That means my 1ghz tibook executes code about as fast as a 600mhz windows machine, which isn't too shabby.

Disk and video performance is a fair bit slower than on the windows machine, but the CPU emulation itself - as others have pointed out - is already damn good. Of course, this just makes the graphics issue that much more critical IMHO.

bah

stop being a wimp

Try running SQL Server 7, Visual Studio, and my company's disk-intensive VB apps all on a 266Mhz powerbook w/ 192MB RAM. Now THAT was slow. Kids these days....

I strongly doubt that

FWIW, the ethernet card in VPC runs as fast as the ethernet interface on your system (and the speed of the VPC) allow. 10mbit is what VPC reports to Windows, but it's basically lying to Windows. The card that Windows sees is actually capable of more than 10mbit, depending on how powerful the Mac is. This is covered by a FAQ or KBase article buried on the Connectix website someplace.

I'll take my empirical results over your strong doubts anyday. You can start by running some benchmarks; SiSoft's Sandra has some good stuff. Windows XP's System control panel thinks my Powerbook is a 550mhz system, and Sandra thinks it's 533mhz, IIRC (haven't checked recently).

Since we all know that benchmarks aren't indicative of real-world performance, blah blah blah, try some real CPU-bound applications. According to both the computer's internal clock and my stopwatch, several of my CPU-bound algorithms execute at the equivalent of a 500-650mhz x86 machine, depending on the algorithm.

So yeah, I stand by my claim of ~60% emulation speed. Maybe not for every case, but out here in the real world it seems to be true. Remember, this is CPU-bound stuff. It has nothing to do with graphics or disk performance.

system profiler says whatever VPC tells it to.


and what exactly is CPU bound without using graphics or disk?

Many, many things. Fast Fourier tranforms (FFTs) are incredibly important in many fields; many algorithms that require FFTs are CPU-bound. String processing needs a lot of CPU, database queries can be CPU-bound (depending on RAM), compiling software can be CPU-bound (depending on a number of factors; compiling can also be I/O bound sometimes). The list goes on + on. Even a simple search + replace in a 10MB document needs a lot of CPU.

If nothing were CPU-bound, there wouldn't be a market for upgrade cards.

Kickaha and Amorph couldn't moderate themselves out of a paper bag. Abdicate responsibility and succumb to idiocy. Two years of letting a member make personal attacks against others, then stepping aside when someone won't put up with it. Not only that but go ahead and shut down my posting priviledges but not the one making the attacks. Not even the common decency to abide by their warning (afer three days of absorbing personal attacks with no mods in sight), just shut my posting down and then say it might happen later if a certian line is crossed. Bullshit flag is flying, I won't abide by lying and coddling of liars who go off-site, create accounts differing in a single letter from my handle with the express purpose to decieve and then claim here that I did it. Everyone be warned, kim kap sol is a lying, deceitful poster.

Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.

Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.

Hi -- I'm intrigued here by the number of people labeling VPC "unusably slow" even on very powerful Macs. I'm currently using a G4 DP 450 MHz machine, which many called "unusably slow" for earlier versions of OS X. While I know that faster machines exist, I've always been able to use it just fine.

Currently, my Windows machine is a 700 MHz Pentium III laptop with 128 MB of RAM. The graphics card is a S3 Graphics SavageIX, which I'm assuming is no great shakes, as it came installed on an 2-year-old entry-level laptop. The machine is running Windows XP Home and I find it perfectly adequate for what I use it for -- XEmacs and Word (for use when I'm on the road), Mozilla Firebird, IE for some Web-based apps I need for work that only work with with IE for Windows, and Microsoft Streets and Trips. How fast a Mac do people think I need to emulate that with VPC?

jf

I'll grant that there have been snafus, especially w/ VPC 5. Bad QA doesn't mean they're stupid, though, it means they have bad QA. There's a big difference.

But don't forget that their engineering staff were the ones answering questions in their forums late at night or on the weekends, and providing prerelease builds to customers who needed a specific bug fix in an effort to make the customers happy. To me, that says that the engineers (as individuals) care about the customers, regardless of what management is/isn't doing. I don't think that makes them stupid, does it?

The engineering staff has also been working hard on products like VPC for Windows, which means less spent on the Mac side. There's more money to be earned in the Windows market, so it's more important (as a company) for them to have sales there than in the Mac market. That sucks for us, but it's business. It doesn't make the engineers stupid. Even brilliant engineers can't do everything at once.

My point is that you're no more justified in calling the individual engineers stupid for doing what management tells them than I am in calling you stupid for disagreeing with me.

Kickaha and Amorph couldn't moderate themselves out of a paper bag. Abdicate responsibility and succumb to idiocy. Two years of letting a member make personal attacks against others, then stepping aside when someone won't put up with it. Not only that but go ahead and shut down my posting priviledges but not the one making the attacks. Not even the common decency to abide by their warning (afer three days of absorbing personal attacks with no mods in sight), just shut my posting down and then say it might happen later if a certian line is crossed. Bullshit flag is flying, I won't abide by lying and coddling of liars who go off-site, create accounts differing in a single letter from my handle with the express purpose to decieve and then claim here that I did it. Everyone be warned, kim kap sol is a lying, deceitful poster.

Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.

Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.

thefamousmred good pots welcome to AI.

An option to speed up VPC would be to make it use a 8 gig hard drive based entirely in RAM considering the disgusting amounts of RAM G5s are capable of and will be capable of soon (4 gig chips? fill up all the slots with those...imagine how much Apple will charge for that!)

Also it would be nice to have VPC support Gigabit Ethernet. Maybe you can help famousmred, I can't get VPC to see the Internet on my Ethernet no matter where I am or what I do. I tried all the different settings in the Script menu. I'm on a PBG4 12" 10.2.6.

A native driver would be great, except I imagine Connectix doesn't see a big payoff for the time invested. The current system works decently for the intended purpose - running a critical Windows-only application - but no matter what they do you're still not going to get a level of performance that'll let you play games.

They do have *some* graphic acceleration though - wasn't the mouse cursor recently modified to be hardware blitted? If they can do that then it's obvious they have the capability to do more elaborate stuff as well.

Someone else asked about what version of Windows to run, Windows 2000 is much better than 98SE. I installed it on an NTFS formatted image (didn't read the comment that FAT32 was preferable in time but I haven't come to regret it yet) and it's actually fairly snappy. It's actually at least as fast displaying folders with large numbers of files as the native Finder is (though to be fair it updates the generic icons with their real look rather slowly), and switching back and forth between the tab panes of a Windows dialog (say for the networking preferences) is as fast if not faster than doing the same on OS X, sad but true. This is VPC 6.01 on 10.2.6, Win2K Professional SP1 with both the Mac and Windows running in 16-bit / thousands. I like running it in a 1024x768 or so window rather than full screen, there's a reason I own a Mac after all, but it is noticeably faster (try a screen saver for instance) when it doesn't have to pay the Quartz compositing tax.

thefamousred,

Welcome. You sound frustrated by the goings on within Connectix. Will MS free you up to do what finally needs to be done with VPC or are you just going to be even more frustrated with it all in the future.

I use VPC6 with Windows98SE. It gets me by using ACT 2000. But it is way slower than the slow PC's the company uses it on.

It sounds like you take this all way too personally. Take a deep breath. A lot of us have waded through some fairly pathetic upgrades (ahem) that keep costing more and more. Version 5 stunk. Went backwards. Version 6 at least got it closer to a liveable speed (for me) but it is clearly not what should be expected after so many years.

Yes with Radeon and NVIDIA you can have a hardware cursor.

Does anyone else get this problem with VPC not using Ethernet?

VPC should work fine over GigE to the best of my knowledge; the PC will continue to report a 10MBit connection, but actual throughput should be greater (limited by the speed of the PC and the host machine's network).

For debugging the ethernet problem, I'd recommend searching the support forums over at connectix.com. A number of other users have had the same problem.