I recently installed Parallels with Windows 7 on my iMac. I tried installing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 but when I tried playing it the graphics lagged to the point where I couldn't even play. I went to Can You Run It? and my system requirements are all above the minimum except my RAM, which shows that I don't even have 1GB available. My iMac has 4GB of RAM. How do I make that available to Windows while running parallels?
Start Parallels, but don't start your virtual machine yet. Click on the 'virtual machine' tab. Select configure and then you should be able to adjust memory.
why not use bootcamp and just have a windows partition? im pretty sure most VMs are way slower than having a actual operating system.
imac is onboard graphics, I believe, eh? Between that (if true), and Parallels, I'm not surprised it runs slowly on there. Try cranking the video options back in the game. You could check settings in parallel and see how much ram is being devoted to running it, maybe? I mean, question is if X = your total ram, and Y = amount given to running parallls (assuming you can change it), then does X-Y= ± <1GB? If you're min specs on the game running through emulator with onboard graphics, it's no wonder.
Is this true? I have tried to play NBA2K11 on my iMac but it was too slow to play. I am now using bootcamp and I have no problem running at all. What's the secret?
Parallels does a decent job for running windows in a virtual environment. However, when it comes to gaming or 3D graphics it does not do such a good job for obvious reasons. I am not going to get into any technical details here but if you want to play games follow the advice of others on here and use bootcamp and install Windows on a separate partition.
You do NOT play games in a virtual environment. Its only been recent that they've been able to do PCI passthrough for physical video cards to be used in a virtual environment. It has to do with the architecture of the virtualized state that you're in when you're running parallels. If you look at your display settings in your virtual environment, you'll see you'll be using a generic display driver instead of the video card that is built in. Virtual environments were never meant to play games with graphic acceleration, and its only been recent where you have to hack your way through to get your PCI-E slot to pass through to your virtual machine, and i'm pretty sure parallels doesn't do that. Your best bet is to bootcamp and dual boot. Or if you want, you can build a cheap gaming computer that can play any type of game you desire. Also, try out VirtualBox for VM's. It's free and works the same, if not better than parallels.
