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UPDATE: MacTech responded to this post, stating that they recognize some of the games did have Mac versions, and testing Windows-only games were “…certainly not the focus.”

MacTech Labs has released the latest testing results of its study of gaming under virtualization. MacTech’s goal was to see how well 20 Windows games played under Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac, giving players advance information on the performance and playability of each game.

MacTech results include video captures of each game, playability scores, and frames per second. Though MacTech stated that games were selected based on whether they were Windows-only, several of the games tested actually have a Mac version released (such as Borderlands: GoTY, released by Feral Interactive; and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, both released by Aspyr Media). Other criteria for inclusion was their popularity, rankings from top gaming sites, and whether they were a good representation of the questions MacTech receives about Windows gaming on the Mac.

MacTech tested these games on unibody MacBook Pros, running 10.6.5, with a 2.53 GHz processor and 4 GB of RAM. They ran Windows 7 virtually, in full screen mode if the game let them.

MacTech concluded that 3/4 of the games tested played well (meaning a score of 7 or more, or with only minor issues), and several played so well that you couldn’t tell that you were running them virtual. However, of those games, the vast majority were more than a year old, and more than half were two or more years old (or already had Mac equivalents). This lead to the conclusion that “…if you are a hard-gamer gamer for the maximum gaming experience, you are going to turn to a souped up WinTel machine tuned specifically to gaming and running a game in virtualization is not a consideration.”

MacTech recommended that virtualization was for “…a casual gamer looking to enjoy a Windows game and avoid the hassles of booting in native Windows under Apple’s Boot Camp. You can read the full article at MacTech’s website.