Interesting: Sean Carruthers did some tests and found out that Adobe Creative Suite 2 running in Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop (aff link) partly performs better than running in Apple’s own PowerPC emulation environment named Rosetta.
Not surprising, since Boot Camp and Parallels can access more or less directly the Intel core while Rosetta must emulate a PowerPC before starting any other tasks. I’m no hardware engineer, but for me it sounds like Rosetta has some more work to do than Parallels or Boot Camp.
However, it leads another time to the question if, along with increasing popularity of emulation environments on the Mac, Mac OS X versions of applications are needed any more
Why not just get your copy of Parallels Desktop, Boot Camp, etc. and run Windows versions on your Mac? Why waiting years for applications to be ported to Mac OS X when you can simply run them in an emulation environment (e.g. OpenOffice)? Perhaps even without any major drawbacks.
Thanks to the latest Parallels update, a combined workflow (coherence mode, drag and drop items) between Windows and Mac OS X has improved significantly. Parallels has done an amazing job during the last months and I guess some major upgrades (e.g. hardware acceleration) can be expected for the near future.
Actually I was positively surprised by ArcGIS’s performance in Parallels Desktop. I expected it to be sluggish and painfully slow, but it wasn’t at all. To complete basic tasks and do some map editing it’s quite ok and usable. The main limitations are RAM and video card. On Parallels Desktop you allocate a certain amount of RAM to your Windows installation, 512MB in my case. I think you can only allocate the half of your built-in RAM as maximum.
The video card is another major drawback: Windows sees a virtual graphic card with only 8MB of VRAM available. Not too much if you’re planning to do some 3D visualization (which I won’t). However, I’m wondering how ArcGIS Explorer (3D!) is performing under this conditions since there won’t be a Mac version.