MACUSER REVIEW: PARALLELS DESKTOP 15 FOR MAC30 MACWORLD DECEMBER 2019
hardware will benefit most.
The folks 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 operatingH E AV Y M E TA L
For those who spend
as much time in a
Windows virtual
machine as they do
native macOS, Parallels
Desktop 15 for Mac (go.
macworld.com/pd15) is
a godsend thanks to
support for Apple’s
hardware-accelerated
Metal graphics API,
which replaces aging
OpenGL. As a result,
Parallels now supports
Windows applications that rely on DirectX
11, while offering improved performance for
DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 as well.
The 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 is quick to note that DirectX 11
support relies heavily on the CPU and
graphics in your Mac, so owners of newer
Apple Metal allows Windows games and applications like Autodesk
3ds Max to perform better than ever, thanks to DirectX 11 support.