Sounds impossible, but Parallels just got better

Parallels 3.0, the virtualization solution for Mac OS X, was released yesterday, and it contains a number of fairly significant new features.

Most important of all, 3.0 includes support for 3D graphics, one of the features that I consider to be the holy grail of virtualization support, because it is often the feature that becomes the limiting factor to using a virtualized environment. It's not just for gaming, there are plenty of other 3D applications (CAD, for a start) where 3D is required.

Gaming is, though, probably what most people will use it for.

And I have to say that it works great. More than great, in fact, it works exactly as advertised on the tin. I haven't tried anything but the Command & Conquer 3 demo so far, but that worked fine. You have to do some tweaks - you need to switch off your VM, enable DirectX support, and then up the video memory. You also have to install DirectX of course.

But once it's all been installed, everything is go. I had to lower the default configuration specs to get the video to display (a function, I suspect, of the reduced video memory of 64MB), but otherwise everything ran fine. Speed is obviously not right up there with native execution, but it's good enough for the casual gamer who doesn't want to lose the ability to run 3D games in their virtualized environment.

I was so impressed with the 3D support that I haven't tried out the other features yet. That's a job to do over the weekend.