Suggested configuration on a 2020 iMac 5K

Howdy,

I've just purchased a new 2020 iMac 5K which I plan to use as my transition machine on the way to Apple silicon.

This is the machine I hope to ride out the transition on while early adopters find and fix the bumps in the road. It should pretty much have the ability to run anything Catalina can currently run, and as I've been out of the virtualization game for a while I'm looking for suggestions or advice on running modern Parallels. My last two iMac 5Ks were the late 2014 and mid 2017 with core-i7s and 3TB fusion drives, so Boot Camp has been rather problematic, and APFS pretty much put the nail in the coffin for Boot Camp untenable for me - I don't want to detail how many times I had to sudo diskutil resetFusion for macOS let alone adding Boot Camp to the mix. I was wondering how other iMac 5K users have configured their systems.

I just ordered my subscription to Parallels Pro 16 and installed Windows 10 2004 on it, installed Parallels tools, and am running it in Scaled mode with a Windows resolution of 2560x1440 at 100% - which I believe UI-wise pretty much reflects the macOS default UI resolution, though I suppose the Windows equivalent would be 5120x2800 with a 200% UI scaling factor. I'm running it in Productivity mode with 4 CPUs, 32 GB and notice that Graphics is set up to use system memory rather than memory on the video card which has 16 GB. (I thought in my old configurations, Parallels would use VRAM on the video card.)

I used to run a fairly enterprise-centric workload and used a lot of work applications since they were quite Windows centric - but I'm retired now and will probably only use Windows for gaming, flashing devices which are Mac compatible (but don't include Mac firmware updaters), and devices which only have Windows-only software.

The Mac has always had a dearth of AAA games, and it seemed to get better for a while and then Catalina landed and seemingly unnecessarily killed all 32 bit software, culling the population of what was available. Who knew that the push for Metal and 64 bit mode were herding developers into a relatively painless transition to Apple silicon?

Any additional information from other users on configuration and real-life use would be appreciated.

-- Thanks, Verne

Environment: 2020 iMac 5K, 128 GB, Radeon Pro 5700 XT 16 GB, 4 TB SSD, 10 gb ethernet, macOS 10.15.6, Boot Camp, Parallels Pro 16.

 

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