I have my Boot Camp partition set up as a VM under VMware Fusion for those times I am out of town and want to get my gaming fix. Since Sid Meiers Civilization IV Beyond the Sword is not yet out for Mac, that gets played under Windows. Team Fortress 2 is another one that runs just fine on the Macbook Pro; I think I will also try Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
Anyway, back to the point. I just tried running Civ4 under VMWare. The game presented a dialogue box about automatically lowering graphic settings, then launched the game. I was hopeful – but alas, the game will not run correctly. The rendering of black “blobs” reminds me of the issues players had with older ATI video cards when the game was released.
If I recall correctly the black terrain indicated that vertex and pixel shading was not supported by the hardware. It appears VMWare has some more work to do on the Direct X 9 support in VMWare. With the competition between VMWare and Parallels, I am sure we’ll get there soon.