[Ado]

I have read alot of complaints about paralells slowing down or corrupting the boocamp option.
Can anyone shed any light onto which one of these solutions are better?Or are therebetter solutions on their way?
I am reading crossover works abit different to Paralells as it doesnt need windows installed.

To make things easier im looking at running adobe apps as well as some 3d apps and games.

[mac128k-1984]

If you're looking at 3d apps and games then neither solution is going to work AFAIK.

You need windows to run natively and have direct-x. Parallels does not support direct-x and on the environment only shows a single cpu so it cannot take advantage of the multi-core cpus in macs. I'm not saying parallels is bad but for your needs its not a good fit.

I haven't tried cross over but it doesn't sound a solution that will give 3d apps and games the type support that is needed.

Boot camp seems to be your only option where you can run games and intensive apps.

I'm running both parallels and boot camp though I don't let parallels touch my BC partition, I'd rather keep two seperate instances as I think its safer (for the moment) as you have posted there are still issues.

[mduell]

Bootcamp, Parallels, and Crossover are three completely different approaches to solving the same problem (running Windows apps on a Mac). The first two require a Windows license and install media, while the latter does not.

Bootcamp is just providing the drivers so you can run Windows on the "bare metal" hardware. On the upside, this means your Mac is now just like any other Windows PC in terms of performance and features. The downside is that you can't run any OS X apps at the same time.

Parallels (and VMware) are virtualization environments. They create a "fake" software computer that you then install Windows in, and inside that you can run Windows apps. The upside is that you can still run OS X apps at the same time (since Parallels is just an application). The downside is that performance in some areas (like graphics) is poor, and it uses a lot of memory (since you're running a full blown Windows on top of OS X).

Crossover "pretends" to be Windows. I'm not sure how better to explain it... when you run a Windows app with Crossover, Crossover acts like it is Windows to the application. The upsides are that you can still run OS X apps at the same time, it doesn't use as much memory as Parallels, performance is very good (so you can play your games). The downside is that it is an incomplete implementation of all the possible stuff an application can ask Windows to do; most popular apps (Office, popular games, etc) work, but some don't (they have a list on their website of what works and what doesn't).

For Adobe apps, you'll have native Intel Mac versions soon enough, so I wouldn't worry about them. For 3D apps and games, Bootcamp and Crossover are your only real options, since Parallels just doesn't have the performance for it. Crossover is the "less painful" of the two options, but if it doesn't work for one of your apps, you'll have to go with Bootcamp.

[brokenjago]

Crossover runs CouterStrike: Source for me awesomely! I lurve it!

[goMac]

Originally Posted by mac128k-1984 

I haven't tried cross over but it doesn't sound a solution that will give 3d apps and games the type support that is needed.

Crossover will do 3D acceleration. I've played Half Life under it.