Shouting Grounds

Adding true multi-monitor support and “experimental” DX 9, it looks like version 2 of Fusion will fully close any gap that may exist between its rivals over at Parallels.

Anyone using Parallels Desktop 3 knows that their idea of “Multi-Monitor” is really “giant-ass monitor” support. They decide to combine horizontal resolutions of multiple monitors when in Convergence mode, using the root monitor’s vertical resolution as a base. This means that you aren’t able to take advantage of 100% screen realestate if you use monitors of varying resolutions. An invisible cutoff point will exist when you try to drag a Convergence window south of your initial display’s max vertical res. Weak.

Fusion 2 actually passes monitor detection to the guest OS, allowing it to treat each additional display as its own, configurable, and arrangeable output. Check the youtube vid below to see this in action. Their testing proves that it can work with as many as 8 independent displays.

Sure, the 3d performance won’t blow anyone’s socks off, but DX 9 support alone is pretty impressive.

the beta 1 release is available as a free download from VMware via the following link. You can see more videos of Beta 1 in action here.

Even though it probably won’t happen, I would like to see either company develop a utility to allow a user to convert a virtual machine into a Boot Camp partition, in case you wanted to dual boot. I realize that it’s probably infeasible, but we can hope can’t we?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Apple, News, Software, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.