I am testing a product which runs in IE 11+ on Win 8.1+ and uses the Microsoft PlayReady DRM. I have win 8.1 loaded into Parallels Desktop 10 for Mac running on Yosemite. I have been told that even if the PlayReady support in IE is successfully invoked, I will still need Microsoft's WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Lab) video drivers which are not supported/installed on virtual machines. Is there a way to have the proper WHQL drivers installed for Win 8.1 running in a Parallels Desktop VM?
Hi Joel, Parallels Desktop have no access to physical graphics cards present in a Mac. Instead, Parallels Display Adapter driver (which is part of Parallels Tools installation) interfaces with virtual hardware and provides 3D acceleration features. The actual acceleration is achieved by translating DirectX commands from the guest to OpenGL API on OS X side. The main purpose of Crossfire (by ATI/AMD) and SLI (by NVIDIA) technologies is to unify pair of 3D accelerators in the sake of increased performance. That way applications keep using standard API (OpenGL or DirectX) and the driver splits tasks between two physical video cards. So please reinstall Parallels Tools and check how it works.
