December 2019 • Macworld 39The adoption of Metal is noteworthy for PC
gamers and CAD software users, for whom some
applications performed poorly or wouldn’t work at
all in earlier versions of Parallels. Particularly for
those running macOS Catalina on recent Macs,
games like Age of Empires: Definitive Edition and
Madden NFL 19 will now run nearly as well as they
do on a real Windows PC.
Formerly incompatible 3D graphics software
like Autodesk 3ds Max not only launches but runs
surprisingly well considering how GPU-intensive
it can be. Parallels notes that DirectX 11 support
relies heavily on the CPU and graphics in your Mac,
so owners of newer hardware will benefit most.
The people at Parallels have managed to eke out
a little more performance for popular productivity
software, too. Launching Microsoft Office apps in
Windows now happens in the blink of an eye – in our
tests, less than three seconds for Word and Excel.
PD15 also boasts a ‘faster and more responsive’
user interface, although launching the host
application felt just a hair slower than last year.
Virtualized hardware
As usual, Parallels Desktop 15 for Mac remains in
lock step with the latest macOS. Although public
betas of Catalina mostly worked fine as a VM in
PD14, an update to Parallels Desktop 15 arriving
shortly after Cupertino pushes out the operating
system in October will include further optimizations,
plus additional support for new features like
Sidecar, Sign in with Apple, and system extensions.