Do Not Buy Parallels 16 for Big Sur Testing

Big Sur VMs is unusable on Catalina host due to 3Mb graphics card limitation

Official statement from technical support:

Thank you for contacting Parallels Support.
This email is in regards to your graphic card usage in Big Sur Virtual machine.
In order to use maximum resources in Big Sur Virtual machine, Host OS should also be Big Sur due to the recent API implementation.
We are closing this ticket. Please get back to us if you have any other queries.
Thank you for choosing Parallels. Have a great day!

 

On a Catalina host machine. Parallels will only allocate a maximum of 3Mb for use by emulated graphics on Big Sur (the underlying card is irrelevant). Normally 256Mb is be allocated by default.

This makes the VM unusable. Apparently this limit does not apply if running om a Big Sur host. I am unable to test this as I only have a single Parallels license running on Catalina

 

That KB article has zero relevance to the issue I am raising which concerns Big Sur virtualisation on Catalina with Parallels 16.

 

To clarify further if you are purchasing or upgrading to Parallels 16 while still running Catalina on your base machine, with the hope of testing the Big Sur beta. That will result in an almost unusable virtual machine due to this issue

This common use-case of beta testing the next version of macOS while still on the current production version of macOS is something that has previously been possible and a feature of the annual upgrade

The product documentation for Parallels 16 fails to mention this limitation.

 

Hi, please sorry for the inconvenience.
Just replied you here.
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