I approve of this. 

What's really funny is that I had to update my video drivers for Windows 8 on my PC to play FE.

But on the Mac, FE played fine under Windows 8 under parallels.

I have defects with the landscape in parallels 8 / windows 7 / imac 27 (late 2009 / ATI Card based) in tactical and battle maps. Looks like the terrain is like 1 "grid" deeper suddenly and you can look "under the terrain". This happens in all maps always along one line but at kinda random places. I did not notice this at first as objects like streets, rivers, houses and so on are all at the right place. But when you move the camera you see they are actually floating above the terrain at this places.

I added a screenshoot for you: http://d.pr/i/KmJF

This is the tutorial map. Walked a bit to the SE from the starting point.

I have yet to check with my MBP which is NVidia Based and has Parallels 7 still...

What are the settings required to make this work? I have it installed under windows 7 in Parallels 8, but the resolution is all jacked up. 3 hours to get downloaded, now on to the next hurdle..... I am also running on retina mbp.

I'm playing with Paralles using the max memory for DirectX and I run it where it runs at 1440x1050 or whatever the half resolution.  What's the resolution like on yours?

I got it working with the same settings, and full screen mode. 

I installed it on my MBP (Paralles 7 / Windows 7 / NVidia Based Graphics) and there it works without the graphical defects. So there seems to be something wrong with either Parallels 8 on an ATI Based iMac . Can this possibly be fixed by the FE Devs or may that just be fixed by the folks at Paralles?

I'm writing this from my MacBook Pro Retina.  

Here's a screenshot of my settings:

http://screencast.com/t/ctCDPAYAsRTx 

I don't suppose they have any updates to their ATI emulation?

@fro

Well there are no "Updates" to single components anyway. But this is the current version of parallels 8. Guessing that it has to do with the ATI background is wild anyway. Actually I never had anything similar and I tried a lot of games in Parallels 8 without noticeable differences between iMac and MBP.

I just tried to switch the iMac Virtualisation from "Experimental DX 10" to "DX 9" but that did not change anything. I also used different Screen resolutions. Steam and none Steam versions. Reinstalled everything and so on.

I am trying to install it on a "non Bootcamp" virtual machine with WinXP next

I also tried it with Wine but had multiple problems immediately with FE getting not even close to work at all.

Well.. in December I get one of the new iMac which will be NVidia based... haha!

Lol.. ok... interestingly it does not have graphical errors when I run it in a Windows XP virtual machine on my iMac (so finally I can play it on my iMac, great!).

I cross checked that multiple times. So it seems to come down to: Problems with "Parallels 8 Windows 7" on ATI based iMac Late 2009. But no Problems with "Parallels 8 Windows XP" on the same iMac.

Next thing I will check is booting into Bootcamp and try it there natively. I may also be a problem with other software running on my (usually just virtualized) Bootcamp Windows.

I didn't know you could play games on Macs, I thought you could only listen to music or create videos and pictures.

YEAH! Todays Update for Parallels 8 seems to fix my problems with graphical errors on iMac Late 2009 in Windows 7 (and even increase the FPS again)!

Just at the moment I am playing in 2560x1440 with very responsive FPS rate (guess about 30 fps)!

So that seemed to be a problem with Parallels 8 and not with the gaming engine!