Parallels Desktop 15 launches with support for DirectX 11 games through Metal on Mac OS X

[ryao]

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2019/8/13/20803359/parallels-desktop-macos-windows-virtualization-directx-metal-apple-gaming

There is very little being said about the gaming support. That video is the only thing that I can find. Gaming footage is at around the 35 minute mark. It shows them running a XBox game on Mac OS X through Parallels 15 through Windows 10 and using an XBox controller. They also have a description about the graphical work that they did at the 2 minute 54 second mark.

 

It seems like Mac OS X users will be able to run Windows in a VM to play most Windows games. It would be interesting if a place like LTT did benchmarks.

[Taf the Ghost]

I don't remember what Anthony's forum handle is, but this should definitely be interesting. 

[ryao]

1 minute ago, Taf the Ghost said:

I don't remember what Anthony's forum handle is, but this should definitely be interesting. 

Numbers comparing this to Boot Camp would be nice. Numbers for this on their hackintosh system versus a native Windows boot would also be nice.

[Lemtea]

6 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

I don't remember what Anthony's forum handle is, but this should definitely be interesting. 

 @GabenJr

[Master Disaster]

5 minutes ago, ryao said:

Numbers comparing this to Boot Camp would be nice. Numbers for this on their hackintosh system versus a native Windows boot would also be nice.

Unfortunately running Parallels on a hackintosh has a bug which means Windows 10 will not boot at all. You're stuck with 8.1 or lower only.

[ryao]

9 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Unfortunately running Parallels on a hackintosh has a bug which means Windows 10 will not boot at all. You're stuck with 8.1 or lower only.

This video shows it working, but it is a bit old. If you watch it, I suggest muting the audio.

I cannot find any references to it being broken in a quick duck duck go search. Are you sure that it is broken?

[Master Disaster]

22 minutes ago, ryao said:

This video shows it working, but it is a bit old. If you watch it, I suggest muting the audio.

I cannot find any references to it being broken in a quick duck duck go search. Are you sure that it is broken?

100%, I run High Sierra on my rig. It's possible it's an AMD only bug because of the custom kernel but when I asked for help at my usual forum I was told it's a known bug with Parallels and Hackintoshing (some even theorised it's deliberate).

[ryao]

@GabenJrIf you test this, check to see if RenderDoc is working. That is considered to be practically impossible to support in Direct3D 11 -> Metal translation without help from Apple:

 

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/issues/203#issuecomment-521847818

 

At least, the people trying to get Vulkan -> Metal working for Direct3D 11 -> Metal through Direct3D 11 -> Vulkan from DXVK do not see a way to do it without help from Apple. It relies on hardware support that is not exposed in Metal. It is presumably omitted because the feature is widely regarded to have been a mistake that will make it impossible to scale performance on tiled graphics architectures. The vulkan designers wanted to omit it, but they relented and made an extension after it was found that DXVK couldn’t implement it in a good way without one.

[vanished]

Good for those who need it I guess.  I would keep expectations in check though, just to be safe, until/unless you get evidence to the contrary.  For one thing, generally speaking you take a pretty significant performance hit with VMs, to the point where only very old games would be playable.  LTT doesn't incur this because they are doing more advanced things than the average user - having a dedicated CPU cores and a GPU you can pass through to the VM, etc. but afaik, most people won't see this benefit running something like this.

[Emily Young]

I feel this will be one of the final hurrahs for Parallels since it’s come to light that macOS Catalina is baking in support for virtualization. Most likely, Apple is working on their own solution, one that utilizes qemu/kvm, which means a dGPU could be passed through (or they could be working on a Virgil implementation). Parallels certainly isn’t helped by the fact that they’ve been becoming less relevant as people switching from Windows to macOS likely are already familiar with it and many major applications are cross platform. Game performance has always been abysmal, and they haven’t focused on it in a long time; Unless something major changed in the new update, I doubt that’s changed, either.

 

But I haven’t looked too closely at it yet. If it comes out that Apple’s rolling their own VM solution, we’ll probably have to test Parallels since its entire raison d’être is going to be jeopardized. Parallels still gets brownie points for the way it manages to tightly integrate its Coherence mode and what have you, but Apple has a way of applying a layer of polish others lack, so even that may not be quite enough… Unless Apple limits if to macOS VMs or to the Mac Pro in particular.

[SenKa]

I personally use VMWare Fusion, tried Parallels and was very unimpressed.

[duncannah]

One thing I've noticed is that antialiasing is forcefully turned off in the graphics, and there's no option to turn it back on

[ryao]

11 hours ago, GabenJr said:

I feel this will be one of the final hurrahs for Parallels since it’s come to light that macOS Catalina is baking in support for virtualization. Most likely, Apple is working on their own solution, one that utilizes qemu/kvm, which means a dGPU could be passed through (or they could be working on a Virgil implementation). Parallels certainly isn’t helped by the fact that they’ve been becoming less relevant as people switching from Windows to macOS likely are already familiar with it and many major applications are cross platform. Game performance has always been abysmal, and they haven’t focused on it in a long time; Unless something major changed in the new update, I doubt that’s changed, either.

 

But I haven’t looked too closely at it yet. If it comes out that Apple’s rolling their own VM solution, we’ll probably have to test Parallels since its entire raison d’être is going to be jeopardized. Parallels still gets brownie points for the way it manages to tightly integrate its Coherence mode and what have you, but Apple has a way of applying a layer of polish others lack, so even that may not be quite enough… Unless Apple limits if to macOS VMs or to the Mac Pro in particular.

If Apple introduces its own hypervisor, it is more likely to be based on Bhyve from FreeBSD than KVM from Linux assuming that it is not a new in-house thing:

 

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhyve

 

I doubt that Apple would do GPU passthrough. Such a solution is not seamless, which would be very unlike them. I had not heard about anything involving Catalina and virtualization, but it could be that they are adding better support for running it as a VM guest via paravirtualiztion support. The idea of anyone wanting to run an OS as a guest other than Mac OS X should be so foreign to Apple that I would be surprised if they integrated a hypervisor.

 

As for something major changing in the update, Parallels now uses Metal and they are no longer relying on Warp to do Direct3D 11 in software. Game performance should be much improved, but I heard that they have a stutter issue in some games similar to what Direct3D -> Vulkan translation exhibits.

[Trixanity]

11 hours ago, SenKa said:

I personally use VMWare Fusion, tried Parallels and was very unimpressed.

I had the opposite experience: used Parallels, tried Fusion and was unimpressed. However at the time Fusion was available to me through a free education license so I used it anyway.

[SenKa]

6 hours ago, Trixanity said:

I had the opposite experience: used Parallels, tried Fusion and was unimpressed. However at the time Fusion was available to me through a free education license so I used it anyway.

What deterred you with fusion, if I may?

[Trixanity]

5 hours ago, SenKa said:

What deterred you with fusion, if I may?

Been a while but if I recall correctly it was performance and battery life as well as the seamless integration between host and guest OS. 

[SenKa]

1 hour ago, Trixanity said:

Been a while but if I recall correctly it was performance and battery life as well as the seamless integration between host and guest OS. 

All 3 of those things are fantastic now. I actually don't notice a ton of difference between running macOS or Windows in Fusion. There is one, of course, but it is nothing near a deterrent for me. Performance is more than acceptable on my 2014 Macbook Air.

[Trixanity]

33 minutes ago, SenKa said:

All 3 of those things are fantastic now. I actually don't notice a ton of difference between running macOS or Windows in Fusion. There is one, of course, but it is nothing near a deterrent for me. Performance is more than acceptable on my 2014 Macbook Air.

I have the exact same machine. I think the last time I did the comparison was three years ago so it's certainly possible things have changed. Fusion did improve in the time I used it but never quite got there.