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  • BluebellFloraBluebellFlora Posts: 7,110 Member
    edited April 2017
    There is no comparison between Parallels and Boot Camp as Boot Camp always delivers a far better experience. Why over resource your Mac with running the macOS, then Parallels, then Windows, then the game. Cut out the middle man and just run Windows. Plus by recommending Parallels you're telling people to not only buy a copy of Windows but also spend another £60+ on 3rd party software that just isn't needed. The space you're allocating to Parallels, whilst dynamic, is still eating into the flash storage on the Mac which, as we all know, isn't upgradeable after-market.

    Parallels has a place and is a great piece of software for low end usage (I use it for Sims4Studio and used to use it for initially setting up CAW worlds before properly building and decorating them) but no way can it be recommended for regular, intense gaming. I hate to think that someone might buy it on recommendation only to be severely disappointed if they like all their graphics to be on high settings and they have all EPs and SPs. No need to buy a PC if you want a better gaming experience, just use Boot Camp instead of Parallels :)
    Post edited by BluebellFlora on
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  • ArielGrintArielGrint Posts: 50 Member
    igazor wrote: »
    @ArielGrint - Bootcamp does not introduce any instability that I have ever been aware of, not sure where that was coming from. Inconvenience yes, because of the need to boot back and forth and the lack of a dynamic partition as you have described, but not instability. I've been playing my intensive long running legacy game on it for years, it's exactly the same as it would be on a PC with similar hardware, and my iMac at time of purchase did not require the sacrifice of quite that many internal organs (I was going to buy the same iMac anyway with or without TS3). Yes, it was more expensive than a PC might have been, but the specs are very good overall, I need/want the Mac side for other uses, and after over five years it is not really showing much in the way of aging. I know that's just me, but I am basing this comment on stability on the large number of other Bootcamp users we have worked with both here and at NRaas over the years; we already know that Macs generally outlive PCs as they age under similar user conditions.

    If we are talking about Mac users with Intel Iris or Iris Pro integrated chips, or those even lessor, then yes there could be performance issues on the Windows side as there would be with any other integrated chip. But the ones with dedicated cards and strong enough processors, the i5s and i7s at 2.4 GHz and higher, fare much better.

    The only odd thing about Bootcamp and TS3 is that I don't get to use exactly the same Windows drivers for my AMD graphics card that PC users do, and am reliant on the very few updates that AMD/Apple provide for us. But that hasn't seemed to have any real impact on the game at all. Oh, and I did have to use a third party tool, Rivatuner Stats Server, to cap my fps rates as Catalyst wouldn't do it and Crimson is not for us, but many AMD users face that issue.

    I will try to open my mind a bit more to the possibility of recommending Parallels, but it's going to be a struggle to do so (in my mind, I mean) in that we really cannot interview potential users here to accurately gauge their usage of the game now and in the future.

    @igazor The instability that I was talking about was not related to Sims 3 on Boot Camp specifically, but to Boot Camp itself. At my old job we had a few Macs(both MacBook Pro's and iMacs) with Boot Camp partitions that were used with a specific 3D modelling program that was not available for Macs. Most of them experienced issues on the actual Windows side of things that made it extremely difficult to work with at times. In the end it turned out that it were the Boot Camp drivers that were behind the trouble and it was impossible to fix it since those only get updated once in blue moon... The problems were really severe so the company purchased a separate machine just for the rendering. The Macs themselves were perfectly capable of handling the workload, as their specs were above and beyond what was required, but those software obstacles just impaired them. So that's why I feel like Boot Camp can be unreliable sometimes.

    Just out of curiosity, what iMac do you have? I think most people tend to have MacBooks rather than iMacs(at least here in the Netherlands that is very true), so if you were to try to buy a MacBook that would run a newer resource-intensive game, say run Dragon Age Inquisition on recommended settings you'd be looking at a price of around €3000... iMacs are cheaper of course, but still pricier than in many other countries. Maybe the price difference and being used to everyone having laptops is also what's making me think of a separate PC for gaming purposes being a cheaper solution. Obviously not everyone is going to need top of the line hardware(especially if Sims 3 is the only game you're playing), but of course you shouldn't align your computer purchase to being able to play a old-ish game :)

    I do certainly agree that hardware is aging far slower on Apple's products than regular PC's though, no doubt in that, so while it might be a better ROI over a longer period of time, it's the moment when you have to part with all that money that makes me go "Eeek!" :)

    As I mentioned, I don't tend to play legacies just because I usually get bored before my original sims have grand grand children, but now I am curious how well my current setup could handle it... maybe I'll try to stick to my game as long as I can bear it and see how it goes after time(though I think that something has already gone wrong there, but well, that happens), perhaps I am underestimating it
  • igazorigazor Posts: 19,330 Member
    edited April 2017
    I do know that TS3 is unstable, I'm from NRaas after all where one of our main goals is to help mod users get their games to be more playable -- as well as more enjoyable, but those have to come in the correct order of course. But I've never heard any reports of Bootcamp making Windows itself or the programs that run on it less stable than they already are. This sounds like an unfortunate combination of things with that specific card, its drivers (which cards, if you remember), and the intense modelling program in question.

    I came into this game thing a bit sideways. Never realized what play style I was going to adopt until I started playing TS3 and it all just sort of happened, unplanned. See I started one TS3 game in late November 2011, on my new iMac, and on OS X. Was overwhelmed by CAS, decided I had no idea what I was doing, quit without saving anything, and went to bed. Tried again the next evening and did a much better job of it, placed my first sim into my first world. And that's it, that's still the game I am playing today. That one sim became the great great etc. grandaddy of them all and my game just sprawled outwards into more generations and other connected worlds (Traveler mod). I have so many storylines going in parallel through rotational play across the worlds and within the same ones that I never even think of starting a new game except to test something. If I want to start up something new, I use or add sims to my already ongoing game and work them in. By the time Pets and Seasons came along, as I'm sure you would expect, playing this way on OS X became impossible so it was either split everything up into much smaller sub-games or switch over to Bootcamp. Parallels was not a serious consideration for me at the time because I really wanted all of the power that my specs could provide to be available to the game, if possible. The same game continued on the Windows side without missing a beat.

    I know not everyone plays or wants to play this way. And not everyone is a very light user who just wants something to amuse them for a few days and then put it away again. Most players are somewhere in between, but we do try to help them prepare for the more intense styles of play when recommending systems, mods, and methods of game file maintenance as it always seems to make sense to shoot higher than what the actual target might seem like at the moment.

    Mid-2011 21.5" iMac, i5 2.7 GHz, 8 GB, Radeon HD 6770M, 2 TB HDD. If I had to buy a new one today, I would go for the 27" lineup since they don't make the smaller ones with dedicated graphics cards anymore. And I would have to buy a new (larger) desk to put it on. ;)

    I do have a laptop, it happens to be a MacBook Pro, but it's not for simming. When I leave the house, my sims stay put where I left them on the desktop.
    Post edited by igazor on
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  • Tremayne4260Tremayne4260 Posts: 3,126 Member
    I run Parallels for my "Windows" side, but then I have an iMac with quad processors so it runs fine. I have run Sims 3 on it, but don't currently as it really was screwed up with the 1.69 update. And in regards to TS2 on Windows, I had to edit the graphics.sgr just to get the game to run properly in the first place. Still going to try using the Aspyr one. Haven't really found the time as I've been playing other games at the moment. :)
    Second Star to the Right and Straight on 'til Morning.
  • BluebellFloraBluebellFlora Posts: 7,110 Member
    It's not so much about the CPUs ( @igazor 's iMac is also quad core) but the graphics drivers as Parallels uses its own driver. Boot Camp uses Apple drivers initially but you can download the NVIDIA or AMD drivers if you wish which does make a difference. When Sims 4 came out I ran it in Parallels and Boot Camp to compare. Same save game, same graphics settings, same 2012 5" MacBook Pro, 2.6Ghz i7 (QC), 1Gb NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M, 16Gb RAM:

    Parallels:
    parallels.png?w=625

    Boot Camp:
    boot-camp.png?w=625

    The Parallels image, whilst fine, looks flat and dull compared to the Boot Camp image.
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  • SaratustraSaratustra Posts: 2 New Member
    I know nobody have posted here for a good while. I just wanted to inform you that I have installed The Sims 3 on my MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2017, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports) and the graphics are still terrible.

    Here is my info:
    Processor: 3,1 GHz Intel Core i5
    Memory: 8 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3
    Software: macOS Mojave 10.14
    Graphics: Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650 1536 MB
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