Parallels 18 Pro, Windows 10 "DirectX 12", Age of Empires IV

I have a MacBook Pro 2016 Intel with discrete graphics card inside.

I have just bought the v18 and updated accordingly my previous Windows 10 (gaming) VM, where Age of Empires III was running decently, and doing great even now. Dxdiag says I have DirectX 12 installed. I obviously had the Parallels Tools installed again on the VM.

Running AOE4 before with Parallels 17 was impossible because DirectX 12 wasn' t supported; while running AOE4 now I receive a msg stating hardware graphics card/drivers aren't fully supported but I am suggested to continue; except it's all incredibily slow and unplayable as if a discrete graphics card wasn't found at all...

In Parallels I left the predefined "Automatic" settings for CPU and Graphics (with Advanced checked by default it'll have "set the best graphics performance") with no result.
Then changed both with a Manual setting higher than the minimum AOE requirements, no effect.
Weird: I had the Parallels graphics set on (Best for) Retina display with Parallels 17, while now it's set by default on Scaled (!) on v18: tried to set it back to Retina resulting having a low resolution VM, and no effect on AOE4 either...

...what's going on?

 

Anybody please?

 

Log time max gamer here. The only reason to use Parallels on a Mac today is if it's an M1/2 Mac. If you have an intel based Mac just boot camp. Open the boot camp utility on your computer and partition. This isn't a Vm, this will run windows directly on your hardware like a pure windows computer. Performance will be much better than any VM. No graphics issues either.

 

Mac* gamer