Metal graphics support for macOS Big Sur virtual machines Get the world's first Metal graphics support for macOS virtual machines - run Mac apps like Maps, Pages, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, and many others. Note: Metal graphics is supported for macOS Big Sur (and later) virtual machines if Parallels Desktop 16 is installed in macOS Big Sur (and later) as well. Please share your Suggestions and Experience here. We will do our best to tune Parallels Desktop for your needs.
Kind. But practically useless if only works under Big Sur itself. The point of Parallels Desktop, however, is to use operating systems on hardware that is actually not suitable for this and therefore has to be simulated. Simulating a system environment that already exists in hardware and works 100% makes no sense, at least in most cases. Metal support would be really useful if it worked with Mojave and Catalina to avoid buying expensive necessary Apple hardware.
My experience is it doesn't work. The exposed eGPU seems to cause guest OS crashes when the OS is OS X (11.01). I even tried forcing an OSx upgrade to 11.1 which, even is experiencing issues. Without the eGPU connected, the OS X (11.01) works fine for days. with the eGPU, in about 4hours the virtual guest just goes 'poof' without even an error message , though it is kind enough to later report there was a failure. I've been dealing with this for about 1.5months now.
I have tried for almost 2 months now. It crashes even when you upgrade OSx to 11.1, all your hard work of many hours just goes waste and that too when you don't get even error message.
Interestingly I don't have an eGPU but am experiencing the same. I have an iMac with an AMD video device built in. I agree that it's the Metal support in Parallels that's causing the crashes because a Big Sur virtual machine I run on macOS Catalina via Parallels Desktop on another Mac never crashes.
I have a beta OS12 VM and have been testing Affinity Photo and Publisher within the VM and they seem to work using Metal. My iMac's main OS is Big Sur, which is required as per the OP. Affinity in the past has said that they do not support a Parallels VM environment, but so far the apps seem to work (I also do beta testing of the Affinity apps as well as the release versions, both work).
This feature is great, but the current usage scenarios are limited. If you can enable this feature on earlier systems, such as Mojave and Catalina, it will be even better, because there are always some old programs that need to run in a virtual machine. The physical machine will always run the latest system. @Maria@Parallels
I think it will be very meaningful to support the metal API (2D / 3D) of some older versions of MacOS, because some older 32-bit programs can be run in the virtual machine.
Running macOS Monterey on macOS Monterey on a MacBook Pro with Intel Iris 550 graphics is pretty abysmal... I don't know whether the Metal support that Parallels Desktop/Apple system software offer either requires a larger, more powerful GPU, or is just plain broken. I have to concede that I cannot make much use of macOS as a guest OS on my Mac, only because the larger apps like to malfunction or crash in the guest OS. Just recenltly, Visual Studio Code for Mac has stopped working (it was working at some point a few months ago, but a recent update has now broken this), and Microsoft Teams has always been unrealiable, both because the window contents cannot be rendered properly in the guest OS. However, there are some things which tend to ease the congestion on the GPU. Reducing transparency, reducing motion and increasing contrast in the guest OS (Settings > Accessibility > Display) actually tends to help by making the performance of Metal emulation better by making less demands on the GPU, but these tricks only go so far; if an application makes great demands on the GPU, the emulation falters, and causes applications to start displaying malfunctions, or get terminated (if the system survives the problems in the first place). I can't rely on macOS-on-macOS emulation with Parallels Desktop 17.1.4 (51567)... I have decided to abandon the notion, only because I believe that my Mac isn't powerful enough to actually drive the system, thanks to the underpowered integrated graphics on my machine. I'lll just continue to use Parallels Desktop to run releases of macOS earlier than Big Sur on my Monterey Mac, because I absolutely need to! Thanks!
