This does lead me to another question. How is the performance with Parallels vs a straight boot camp boot to windows? Also, as a follow up, can I run more than one instance of parallels running a windows instance? In other words, is it like a VMWare config? Thanks in advance.
Apple, Please please lean on AMD to update the ADM Crimson drivers too for Boot Camp! When I boot into Windows 10 on my 6 core Mac Pro and run Steam I am so far behind in driver versions it isn't true. VMs can't run GTA V before someone suggests I use one!
The blame may be on the game developers. If they don't bother with writing to the metal via AMD's Vulkan API, their performance on AMD may be low whatever the AMD driver is. There is a significant architectural difference between AMD and NVidia. Nvidia does not allow low level access to the GPU, in contrast AMD (and Apple with Metal) prioritize low level acces to the GPU over anything else. With Metal and Vulkan you can make the GPU sing to your pleasure, with Nvidia's CUDA you can't. So the situation is much more complicated than the driver version.
Apple, Please please lean on AMD to update the ADM Crimson drivers too for Boot Camp! When I boot into Windows 10 on my 6 core Mac Pro and run Steam I am so far behind in driver versions it isn't true. VMs can't run GTA V before someone suggests I use one!
The blame may be on the game developers. If they don't bother with writing to the metal via AMD's Vulkan API, their performance on AMD may be low whatever the AMD driver is. There is a significant architectural difference between AMD and NVidia. Nvidia does not allow low level access to the GPU, in contrast AMD (and Apple with Metal) prioritize low level acces to the GPU over anything else. With Metal and Vulkan you can make the GPU sing to your pleasure, with Nvidia's CUDA you can't. So the situation is much more complicated than the driver version.
This post makes no sense. Starting from the bottom. CUDA and Vulkan are not related. One is a graphics API and the other is a GPGPU API. Think OpenGL vs OpenCL.
Nvidia supports Vulkan.
Vulkan and Metal are competing APIs. You don't "write to the metal via Vulkan"
Of course for trivial PC crap like Office I use VMWare or Parallels.
I'm not putting any Windows or VM crap on my Mac. If I need to do anything in Windows I have a $600 Asus all-in-one running Windows 10 with Office or else I just have my secretary do it.
I hear you but I don't have any Windows on my Mac as such, I have external SSDs with Windows 10 on, I boot into those directly after detaching all my other peripherals. VMs are perfectly safe if you switch off the 'sharing' features in the likes of Parallels but they are also useful for running other versions of Mac OS X as well as macOS, Unix and so on.
I'm genuinely surprised that Apple still supports Boot Camp. Are there any statistics on what fraction of Mac users use Boot Camp?
Also, among Boot Camp users, why do they use it? Is it mostly about games? Aside from games, I would think Parallels (or VMware) would be the better solution.
You are correct, it's about high end CPU/GPU intensive games which are sorely lacking sadly for macOS. As a keen gamer (GTA V, Watch Dogs2, Tomb Raiders etc) when not doing professional photography and videography work on my 6 core Mac Pro with its Thunderbolt RAIDs. Absent Bootcamp Drivers booting into Windows external SSDs for Steam etc. is doable, but the keyboard and other Apple unique drivers would be sorely missed. Boot Camp isn't just for creating a partition on your internal, it's a valuable source of Apple drivers for Windows for those of us making our own external boot drives for Windows. Of course for trivial PC crap like Office I use VMWare or Parallels.
Thanks to everyone who answered my question!
So it sounds like it's largely, but not exclusively, about games.
Bummer that Apple doesn't do more to support games on the Mac. I would think that Mac marketshare, particularly in the US, is now large enough that more games could be ported and perform well on the Mac *IF* Apple provided better support. Oh well.
I'd love to see all the high end game companies bought out by Apple and Apple then close the Windows versions departments OK I'm kidding but I'd agree it's a real shame more high end games are not on macOS.
Apple, Please please lean on AMD to update the ADM Crimson drivers too for Boot Camp! When I boot into Windows 10 on my 6 core Mac Pro and run Steam I am so far behind in driver versions it isn't true. VMs can't run GTA V before someone suggests I use one!
The blame may be on the game developers. If they don't bother with writing to the metal via AMD's Vulkan API, their performance on AMD may be low whatever the AMD driver is. There is a significant architectural difference between AMD and NVidia. Nvidia does not allow low level access to the GPU, in contrast AMD (and Apple with Metal) prioritize low level acces to the GPU over anything else. With Metal and Vulkan you can make the GPU sing to your pleasure, with Nvidia's CUDA you can't. So the situation is much more complicated than the driver version.
This post makes no sense. Starting from the bottom. CUDA and Vulkan are not related. One is a graphics API and the other is a GPGPU API. Think OpenGL vs OpenCL.
Nvidia supports Vulkan.
Vulkan and Metal are competing APIs. You don't "write to the metal via Vulkan"
Yes with that GPGPU API you write only to a software layer, not to the metal. That is the point.
You write close-to-metal with Vulcan. This is not Apple's "Metal" this is "GPU's metal"
Vulkan™ supports close-to-metal control enabling faster performance and better image quality across Windows® 7, Windows® 8.1, Windows® 10, and Linux®.
Developed by the Khronos Group, the same consortium that developed OpenGL®, Vulkan™ is a descendant of AMD’s Mantle, inheriting a powerful low-overhead architecture that gives software developers complete access to the performance, efficiency, and capabilities of Radeon™ GPUs and multi-core CPUs.
I don't compare Apple's Metal with Vulcan here. That's another issue. The architectural difference between Nvidia and AMD was the point of my post. Nvidia supports Vulkan but to what extent? According to the posts in game forums the situation is not very brilliant for Nvidia.
Well I first used Fusion to run MS Office as I found many compatibility issues between PC & Mac even when using MS Office on both.
I also liked the idea that I could run Win95, WinXP, Vista & Windows 7 in virtual machines but then realised it was more for show...used to enjoy peoples expressions when I remotely logged in to a Mac running WinXP for example from my iPad and people were amazed I could run Windows on an iPad!
Went over to Parallels mainly for the Parallels Access app but then abandoned all of the virtualisation software and went Bootcamp for better compatibility/performance with hardware such as WinRadio, RadarBox and other hardware that struggled with the overhead required of a VM.
With Bootcamp my Macs then became the best PC's I have ever had from initially installing Windows to boot-up to shutdown and everything inbetween.
Straying a little from topic and the reason I am posting/waffling here is because for over a year now I have been unable to use Microsoft Update on my MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and iMac - it just sits there checking for updates for hours/days without actually finding anything.
Thinking it might have to do something to do with my network/router I took both MacBooks to friends houses and found the same problem.
Has anybody else seen this inability to get MS Update to work and more importantly how to resolve it please?
I'm genuinely surprised that Apple still supports Boot Camp. Are there any statistics on what fraction of Mac users use Boot Camp?
Also, among Boot Camp users, why do they use it? Is it mostly about games? Aside from games, I would think Parallels (or VMware) would be the better solution.
I use it. I have SQL Server 2016 installed in windows and I want to be able to use it to its fullest extent processor-wise. I get that having a standalone windows server may be the better way to go, but I like having the convenience of being able to use the mac to do what I need to get done without having to do that.
So you have a Mac running Windows just to run SQL Server? So when you want to run macOS you have to shut down Windows and your SQL Server database? Or can one run Windows and macOS simultaneously now? I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm trying to understand the use case.
Yes. I'm just getting into SQL Server 2016. I don't have a requirement to keep the instance running. I've been with SQL Server since the 4.2 days (before there was an enterprise manager...i.e. for over 20 years). Doing BI and some other stuff with it that's all. I also have Sony Vegas on the Windows instance and I refuse to learn FCP because I'm old and don't really care to learn it. I hope this doesn't set off a Vegas vs FCP fire storm.
I'm genuinely surprised that Apple still supports Boot Camp. Are there any statistics on what fraction of Mac users use Boot Camp?
Also, among Boot Camp users, why do they use it? Is it mostly about games? Aside from games, I would think Parallels (or VMware) would be the better solution.
I use it. I have SQL Server 2016 installed in windows and I want to be able to use it to its fullest extent processor-wise. I get that having a standalone windows server may be the better way to go, but I like having the convenience of being able to use the mac to do what I need to get done without having to do that.
So you have a Mac running Windows just to run SQL Server? So when you want to run macOS you have to shut down Windows and your SQL Server database? Or can one run Windows and macOS simultaneously now? I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm trying to understand the use case.
Yes. I'm just getting into SQL Server 2016. I don't have a requirement to keep the instance running. I've been with SQL Server since the 4.2 days (before there was an enterprise manager...i.e. for over 20 years). Doing BI and some other stuff with it that's all. I also have Sony Vegas on the Windows instance and I refuse to learn FCP because I'm old and don't really care to learn it. I hope this doesn't set off a Vegas vs FCP fire storm.
Comments
http://blog.parallels.com/2015/01/28/run-multiple-operating-systems-easily-parallels-desktop-mac/
The performance with Parallels depend on the amount of memory you allocate to it. Under BootCamp, Windows uses all the machine RAM, obviously.
Nvidia supports Vulkan.
Vulkan and Metal are competing APIs. You don't "write to the metal via Vulkan"
I'd love to see all the high end game companies bought out by Apple and Apple then close the Windows versions departments
Yes with that GPGPU API you write only to a software layer, not to the metal. That is the point.
You write close-to-metal with Vulcan. This is not Apple's "Metal" this is "GPU's metal"
Vulkan™ supports close-to-metal control enabling faster performance and better image quality across Windows® 7, Windows® 8.1, Windows® 10, and Linux®.
Developed by the Khronos Group, the same consortium that developed OpenGL®, Vulkan™ is a descendant of AMD’s Mantle, inheriting a powerful low-overhead architecture that gives software developers complete access to the performance, efficiency, and capabilities of Radeon™ GPUs and multi-core CPUs.
http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/technologies-gaming/vulkan
I don't compare Apple's Metal with Vulcan here. That's another issue. The architectural difference between Nvidia and AMD was the point of my post. Nvidia supports Vulkan but to what extent? According to the posts in game forums the situation is not very brilliant for Nvidia.
I also liked the idea that I could run Win95, WinXP, Vista & Windows 7 in virtual machines but then realised it was more for show...used to enjoy peoples expressions when I remotely logged in to a Mac running WinXP for example from my iPad and people were amazed I could run Windows on an iPad!
Went over to Parallels mainly for the Parallels Access app but then abandoned all of the virtualisation software and went Bootcamp for better compatibility/performance with hardware such as WinRadio, RadarBox and other hardware that struggled with the overhead required of a VM.
With Bootcamp my Macs then became the best PC's I have ever had from initially installing Windows to boot-up to shutdown and everything inbetween.
Straying a little from topic and the reason I am posting/waffling here is because for over a year now I have been unable to use Microsoft Update on my MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and iMac - it just sits there checking for updates for hours/days without actually finding anything.
Thinking it might have to do something to do with my network/router I took both MacBooks to friends houses and found the same problem.
Has anybody else seen this inability to get MS Update to work and more importantly how to resolve it please?
Thanks...