Windows 8.1 video driver periodically crashing on Parallels 16

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dpenton-mg

Bit poster
Hi,

I have Parallels 16 running on macos (Big Sur 11.1). The guest OS is Windows 8.1. The display driver crashes on me multiple times a day.
Driver date: 2020-12-18
Driver version: 16.1.2.49151
There does not seem to be a later version to update. I do not get anything useful in the Windows Event logs for crash details. This has happened only since the upgrade to Parallels 16 / Big Sur.

Order of operations:
While on Catalina I upgraded from Parallels 15 to Parallels 16 and ran for a few days on that.
Upgraded from Catalina to Big Sur.
Multiple reboots of the guest OS and of the macbook

Usually I get this in the System event log: Display driver prl_dd stopped responding and has successfullly recovered. But, today my Windows VM had a hard crash. I have not had a hard crash on this VM for 3+ years.

Any suggestions on where to look, or what disagnostics to enable to get to the root cause?

Thanks,
David
--
David L. Penton
 
Anyone at Parallels have any comment about this? Did I post in the wrong forum?

My video driver crashed 6x in a row yesterday (but recovered).
 
Replying again...anyone who works for Parallels interested in these crashes? Anyone? Bueller?
Looks like maximized apps in the Windows VM trigger the crash more often. What diagnostics can I enable to try to get to the root cause?
 
Follow-up: After my last reply, I went through each setting in Parallels. I was going to try to disable "Retina" but I saw that with the last upgrade Parallels limited the amount of video RAM for my VM (I believe the setting was at 1GB, but the recommended was shown to be 2GB). I changed that and I have not had a crash since.

Note that I didn't limit the video memory in the past, but I did have system memory limited as I do software development on bother the Mac side and the Windows side.

I would consider this matter closed now. But, it would have been nice to get someone on the Parallels staff to comment on any other diagnostic possibilities.
 
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