

Players start by choosing one of the four dynasties of ancient China, each with their own unique starting area, resources and goals. Unlike its predecessors, Age of Empires III features a rich, non linear storyline, which ties into the gameplay quite nicely, whilst enhancing the game's depth with the addition of the different dynasties of Asia. The final score of this benchmark for my iMac is 1172.6.Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties brings a new twist to the popular real time strategy game Age of Empires. Speaking of benchmarks, Age of Empires II does have an internal game benchmark, which runs for a few minutes with LOTS of players and LOTS of game action (Figure 3). Age of Empires also runs a quick processor and graphics benchmark test, and my system is rated “High” for both CPU and graphics. At first launch, I do see a warning that Age of Empires does not detect sufficient graphics memory, but I ignore this warning because I know that Parallels Desktop provides graphics memory to Windows apps in a manner that Age of Empires does not know about. I turn off some of the high-end graphics preferences like Fog Animation and Bloom.


I play both of these in the full screen in Windows, but I use the Window View mode in Parallels Desktop.

I usually run Windows 10 Insider Preview builds from the Developer Channel, and this VM is no exception: Typically, games take a lot of system resources, so I have changed the configuration details for my Windows 10 gaming VM. Figure 2_My virtual machines Windows 10 – my gaming VM
