Mac Boot Camp Support Windows 8

Windows 8 arrives

For many Mac users who occasionally need to run Windows applications, virtualization solutions like Parallels Desktop, VMware Fusion, and VirtualBox are often the best way to do so. You take a definite performance hit with virtualization programs, but for most people the ability to run the applications they need without rebooting is more than convenient enough to make up for such shortcomings.

So, assuming you have a relatively recent Mac, the first thing you’ll need to install Windows 8 Preview Release via Boot Camp is, not surprisingly, a copy of Windows 8 Preview Release, which. Apple released a Boot Camp 5 update that added 64-bit driver support for Windows 7 and Windows 8 on Tuesday. Instead of a single updater file, Apple has two updaters to choose from depending on.

There is one exception: gaming. 3D performance is either much-reduced by virtualization or (in the case of VirtualBox) completely non-existent, and given that most Macs don't have top-shelf graphics processors to begin with, there's simply no substitute for running Windows on bare metal, as they say.

This means using Boot Camp to install Windows on your Mac as you would to any PC, and that means relying on Apple's Windows drivers to get everything working properly. The issue is that Apple doesn't exactly prioritize Windows driver updates, and this is doubly true when a new version of Windows is concerned: Boot Camp support for Windows 7 trailed general availability by about three months, and the song remains the same for Windows 8.

But official support be damned, we say! We installed Windows 8 on our 2011 iMac and 2010 MacBook Air to see what happened, and we kept a log of our findings to help those of you who don't feel like waiting on Apple's drivers.

Setup process

Because we haven't talked about this in a while, let's take a gander at the Boot Camp installation process as it stands in Mountain Lion. Here's what you need:

• A Mac that supports Mountain Lion and has at least 20GB of free disk space, though more is obviously preferable.
• A valid Windows 8 or Windows 8 Pro license key. For the purposes of this article, we're going to assume you're working with the 64-bit version of Windows (and at this point, you probably should be anyway).
• If you're using a Mac with an optical drive or a MacBook Air older than the 2011 model, you'll need a Windows 8 install DVD (and, for the older Airs, an external optical drive).
• If you're using a 2011 or 2012 MacBook Air or any other Mac without an optical drive, you'll need either an external optical drive and a Windows 8 install DVD, or a 4GB or larger USB stick and a Windows 8 ISO file. More on this in a bit.
• A FAT-formatted external drive or blank CD or DVD on which to store the Windows driver files.

Once you've gathered the necessary materials, launch the Boot Camp Assistant from Spotlight or by navigating to Applications and then to Utilities. It will walk you through partitioning your drive to install Windows, downloading the necessary driver files to your external drive, and (for newer MacBook Airs, Retina MacBook Pros, iMacs, and Mac Minis without optical drives), creating a USB installer for Windows from an ISO file.

Users of slightly older Macs, however, will notice that the installer still requires a Windows install DVD before it will start working, and the option to create a USB drive isn't even available—those with access to an optical drive cannot opt to use any other method. Strangely, this requirement applies even to 2010, 2009, and 2008-era MacBook Airs, all of which shipped without optical drives; people with those computers will have to find an external optical drive before continuing.

After formatting your drive, let the Boot Camp Assistant reboot your computer, and install Windows to your newly created Boot Camp partition as you would to any PC. When going through the installer, be sure to reformat the Boot Camp partition to NTFS, but don't delete it—this will break the partition and require you to start over again from the beginning.

These days, the Windows installer is dead simple to get through as long as you're not terrified of technology—enter your product key and create a user account and you've done most of the heavy lifting. Once you reach the Start screen, insert the external drive containing the Windows support files, navigate to it from the desktop, and run setup.exe.

The Boot Camp installer shouldn't throw up any red flags—accept all of the setup defaults, and sit back and wait while it installs all of Apple's driver software along with Apple Software Update, and reboot when it prompts you to.

How does it work?

The vast majority of programs and drivers that work with Windows 7 also work with Windows 8. Luckily this also applies to much of Apple's Boot Camp software, including read-only access to your Mac's HFS-formatted partition, the Boot Camp control panel that lets you select your default boot partition and adjust other system settings, and the software that makes the Mac's function keys operate as they all do in OS X.

There are some small issues: the graphical overlays for things like volume and brightness don't show up in Windows 8, though the buttons operate normally, and things that bother me about Boot Camp in Windows 7 (like the inability to access FileVault-encrypted volumes) persist in Windows 8, but the new operating system doesn't bring any major, system-breaking new problems.

Driver issues

The biggest issues, especially for gamers, are the drivers. Depending on the Mac you have, you may need to track down and install some additional drivers yourself—2009 and 2010-era Macs with NVIDIA chipsets will probably need to download a separate chipset driver, available here (most Macs use vanilla Intel chipsets, though, so it shouldn't be an issue for anyone else).

The bigger problem is simply outdated drivers, particularly graphics drivers. The Boot Camp 4.0 software came out with Lion in summer of 2011 and hasn't really been updated since then, and as a result you may find yourself using drivers missing almost two years of fixes and performance enhancements.

Luckily, new drivers are just a few clicks away—Macs use standard PC graphics chips, and these can be powered with standard PC drivers. Below, I've laid out a table of Macs, the graphics chips they use, the driver you'll want to download to go with them, and any other applicable information you'll need to know. All of the drivers below are for use with the 64-bit versions of Windows 8 (but even if you're still sticking with Windows 7, these drivers should help you out, too).

This list should be fairly comprehensive as it stands, but note that we can't possibly test all of the GPUs listed with the suggested drivers, and one person's rock-solid driver could be a buggy, crashing mess for someone else. If you've encountered particular issues with a driver and GPU combo, bring it up in the comments and see if someone can get you the answers you're looking for. With a bit of luck you'll be able to find a relatively current driver that brings your graphics performance up to its best possible level.

Retina support

One final footnote before we finish up here: how does Windows 8 handle the Retina Display currently shipping in some MacBook Pros? When we installed Windows 7 on a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, our experience with 200 percent scaling was hit-or-miss, but Windows 8 is supposed to improve Windows' scaling for use with screens of many different pixel densities.

On the desktop, things haven't changed that much. Many of the same issues we had in Windows 7 persist: some icons and text looks great, other graphics (including the mouse pointer) look pretty bad. The biggest issue is still with consistency—different applications have vastly different behaviors, and while some applications look just great, others are blurry messes (or, worse, choose to ignore the scaling settings altogether).

The behavior is slightly better for Metro apps. Every one of those I used, from the built-in Mail and Calendar apps to the New York Times and Kindle apps, looked just fine scaled up, though that doesn't mean every app you use will be that way—the Metro version of Chrome, for example, gave me a scaled-up scroll bar but chose to render pages at the same scaling level as before.

Conclusions: Who needs official support?

The variety of Mac configurations out there make this sort of thing an inexact science, but in our experience you shouldn't have problems running Windows 8 on your Macs if you really want to. Official support will smooth over some of the rough edges in the experience, including lack of function key overlays and old, old graphics drivers, but Windows 8's compatibility with software and drivers made for Windows 7 should serve Mac users well here.

Install Windows on your Mac

Boot Camp is a utility that comes with your Mac and lets you switch between macOS and Windows. Download your copy of Windows 10, then let Boot Camp Assistant walk you through the installation steps.

Update AMD graphics drivers for Windows in Boot Camp

Download and install the latest AMD graphics drivers for Windows on Mac models that use AMD graphics.

Use your Apple keyboard in Windows

You can use an Apple keyboard or a keyboard designed for Microsoft Windows with your Mac. Many of the keys that you'd see on a PC have equivalent keys on an Apple keyboard.

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Boot Camp Windows 10 Support