Parallels Desktop 27 для M-чипов: новый драйвер Metal позволяет запускать Windows-приложения с OpenGL 4.3

A new Metal-based graphics driver takes Windows virtual machines on M-series Macs past the OpenGL ceiling Microsoft's own Arm compatibility layer imposes. ArcGIS Pro, ZWCAD and Blender 4.3 now run. And on M4 Macs and newer, Arm's matrix maths instructions get passed straight through to Linux and Windows guests. Parallels shipped Parallels Desktop 27 on 25 August, and the release note that matters is a version number most people will scroll straight past: OpenGL 4.3. Here's why it's a big part of the whole story. Windows on Arm has never had a real OpenGL driver. What it has is Microsoft's OpenCL and OpenGL Compatibility Pack, a Mesa-based translation layer that maps OpenGL calls onto DirectX 12. It works, and it stops at OpenGL 3.3. Blender's minimum requirement is OpenGL 4.3. So is a long list of engineering, GIS and CAD software. That gap of one decimal point is the reason a chunk of professional Windows apps simply refused to launch on an Apple silicon Mac, no matter how much grunt the M4 Max underneath had spare. Parallels has now written its own OpenGL 4.3 driver on top of Metal, and it says no other Mac virtualisation product has one. What the new driver actually changes The claimed numbers, all from Parallels' own internal testing: Treat vendor benchmarks the way you'd treat any vendor benchmark. Parallels ran them, Parallels picked the tasks, and the fine print concedes results vary with hardware, configuration and workload. The 160% and the 2.6x are the same measurement wearing different clothes, which is worth noticing before anyone quotes both as separate wins. The ArcGIS Pro result is the one with real weight behind it, because Esri already blesses this path. Esri's own documentation says virtualisation is the only supported way to run ArcGIS Pro on an M-series Mac, and it names Parallels Desktop 18 or later with Windows 11 Arm as the guest. Esri will take your support call, though it only chases defects on certified Windows x64 hardware. For anyone in Australian GIS, surveying, mining services or local government sitting on a Mac fleet, that combination of "only supported route" plus "35% faster at the thing you do all day" is the practical headline. The AI part, and why M4 is the cut-off Parallels Desktop 27 passes Arm's Scalable Matrix Extension 2 instructions through to Linux and Windows guests. SME2 is the matrix maths unit Apple started shipping with M4, which is why M1, M2 and M3 owners get nothing here. The claimed gains, measured in an Ubuntu VM on an M4 Pro Mac: - Up to 7x faster matrix operations - Up to 1.75x faster neural network inference - Better performance for Ollama and llama.cpp running inside the VM What this is actually for is narrower than "AI acceleration" suggests. It's for developers who want to build and test a model locally, in a Linux VM, on the Mac already on their desk, without renting a GPU instance for the privilege. If that's your workflow, 7x on the matrix operations is a genuinely useful number. If it isn't, this feature does nothing for you. There's a small irony in it. Apple's own frameworks reach the same silicon directly. Parallels' contribution is making sure the guest OS can see it too, which is the sort of plumbing you only notice when it's missing. The AI acceleration and the OpenGL driver are both Pro edition features, so Standard buyers miss out on the two headline items, but pro users have the Pro edition available for good reason. What Parallels still can't do Parallels' own knowledge base is refreshingly honest on this, and it's worth reading before you buy. The current limitations of Windows 11 on Apple silicon: - 3D acceleration caps at DirectX 11.1 and OpenGL 4.3. Modern AAA games that want DirectX 12 won't run. - No nested virtualisation, so no Hyper-V, no WSL2 (WSL1 works), no VBS, and some emulators fail. - Windows 11 Arm's x86 translation handles most things, but "most" isn't "all". Esri adds a few more for ArcGIS Pro specifically: tools needing AVX instructions won't work, GPU access is limited, DirectX 12 features fall back to DirectX 11, and deep learning tools aren't tested or certified in a VM. The DirectX 11.1 ceiling has been the top request on the Parallels forums for years now. Version 27 doesn't move it, or at least – not yet. Enterprise, DevOps and the Jamf angle The enterprise list is unglamorous and, for anyone running a Mac fleet, probably the most immediately useful part of the release. The command-line interface can now report whether a copy of Parallels Desktop was activated with a licence key or via single sign-on. That sounds trivial until you've tried to build a Jamf extension attribute to work out which of your 400 Macs are on which activation path. Now it's one CLI call. Secure Golden Images Provisioning distributes approved VM images through enterprise storage, including Azure Blob Storage and SharePoint. Paired with improved declarative deployment, the target is zero-touch provisioning of a fully built Windows VM with no admin touching the machine. Parallels has also renewed its SOC 2 compliance, and the company says Arm SystemReady certification is in progress. For DevOps teams there's a native graphical interface for the Parallels DevOps Service, which until now meant living in the command line and the REST API. Jenkins dynamic provisioning of Mac-hosted VMs is the other addition, aimed squarely at iOS and macOS build farms. Parallels Desktop 27 also supports macOS 27 Golden Gate in both Standard and Pro, with no reinstall and no VM rebuild required. MacRumors expects Golden Gate by 21 September at the latest, since the new Mac mini and Mac Studio ship with it on 22 September. Getting compatibility out before the OS lands is the sort of thing you only appreciate the year a vendor doesn't manage it. The quote, and who said it From the Parallels announcement of 25 August 2026: "As customers continue to push the limits of what they do on Mac, they're looking for virtualisation that keeps pace with increasingly demanding applications and workflows. Parallels Desktop 27 enables customers to run more of the Windows applications they depend on while giving developers faster local AI performance and expanding what's possible on Apple silicon." Parallels Chief Product and Technology Officer, Elena Koryakina, in the Parallels press release, 25 August 2026 Koryakina is worth a moment. She came up through Parallels engineering, was SVP of Engineering before the CPTO role, and she posts about building AI agents on her weekends, including a volcanic hazard agent for Mount Rainier she wrote up in detail. A CPTO who still ships code is not the norm at this end of the market, and it’s impressive to see – Koryakina is a winner! How it stacks up against the alternatives The competitive picture on Mac has changed shape since Broadcom took VMware. The Fusion situation is the interesting one. Broadcom made Fusion free, then let it drift. The Register argued last week that Broadcom is deliberately shedding all but 10,000 to 30,000 of VMware's 350,000 customers to chase the big Cloud Foundation bundles. A free desktop hypervisor for Mac users is not on that list of priorities. I made the same argument when Parallels Desktop turned 20 in July: a paid player has far more motivation to build the best product it can. Version 27 is the evidence. Writing a Metal-backed OpenGL 4.3 driver from scratch is not the behaviour of a product on maintenance. The corporate backdrop Some context that's easy to miss, because it happened quietly. In February, Corel announced it was splitting in two. CorelDRAW, MindManager and WinZip went to Vector Capital under the Corel name. Parallels Desktop and Parallels Workspace Solutions stayed with KKR as a standalone company called Parallels, with Christa Quarles continuing as CEO. The transaction was set to close in May. The Alludo brand, which is what Corel renamed itself to in 2022, disappeared along the way. Corel is the brand name that alludes to and exudes quality, and it’s good to see Alludo gone – and Parallels effectively independent once more. So, Parallels Desktop 27 is the first major desktop release from a Parallels that only has to think about virtualisation. Quarles said at the time that independence would let the company sharpen its focus, which is what every CEO says about every split, but the release cadence since suggests there's something to it - although Parallels has released a yearly update for many, many years. Two other data points from the same stretch: Parallels was named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Desktop as a Service on 13 August, its first time in the Leaders quadrant, and a Leader in two 2026 IDC MarketScapes covering virtual client computing and DaaS. Those cover Parallels RAS and Parallels DaaS rather than the Mac product, but they tell you where the investment is going. Australian pricing and availability Parallels Desktop 27 runs on Apple silicon only. M1 through M6, with the AI acceleration needing M4 or newer. Recommended retail, from the Parallels Australian store at time of writing, with a promotional discount running: Enterprise licensing and volume deals over 10 seats are quote-based. Standard also has a one-time purchase option. Students get a discount, and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. Note that the two marquee features of this release, the OpenGL driver and the SME2 pass-through, sit in Pro and above. If you bought Standard for AU$63 expecting Blender to run, it won't. Pro is pro for good reason! Parallels maintains an app compatibility database of more than 200,000 Windows applications, which is the fastest way to check before you commit. My take Full disclosure: I've been a Parallels Desktop user for years and I'm a happy one. It lives on my Mac for two jobs. The first is supporting Windows users. The second is for a tiny handful of Windows-only apps that have no Mac equivalent and never will, or because I need to run the Windows version of Office 365 for some specific reason. And here's the part that still surprises people when I say it out loud: in my humble estimation, Parallels runs Windows better on a Mac than a lot of PC hardware runs Windows natively. Some of that is Apple silicon being very quick at the single-threaded work most Windows apps actually do. Some of it is that a VM disk image on an SSD that fast behaves better than a mid-range laptop's real one. When Parallels put a virtualised MacBook Neo up against a native Intel Dell Pro 14 earlier this year, the Mac running Windows in a VM on 8GB of shared memory won on single-core. That result should not be possible, and yet… it is! Version 27 doesn't change the shape of the product. It removes a specific obstacle that kept a specific set of professionals off Apple silicon entirely, and it hands developers a way to use the matrix unit in their M4 from inside a Linux guest. Both are narrow. Both are real. The thing I'd still like fixed is DirectX 12. It's been the top forum request for years, it's the reason a lot of Windows gaming stays off the Mac, and version 27 doesn't touch it – or at least, as I mentioned above, not yet. Given Parallels just proved it can write a modern graphics driver from the ground up, that one feels closer than it did in August. For now, if you're a GIS analyst, a CAD user or a 3D artist who's been told a Mac can't do your job, that excuse just expired. Sources LinkedIn profiles