On macOS Monterey, you can also drag and drop any content from Windows apps to Quick Note as easily as from macOS apps. In Parallels Desktop 17 you can now drag and drop text or graphics between Mac and Windows applications, quickly and easily. Drag and drop text/graphics between Mac and Windows You can see from the screenshot above that in Parallels 17 there are nearly no dropped frames (notice the nearly 60FPS average in my test). I also ran a quick frames per second test in Windows using Vsync Tester to verify the improvement witnessed while gaming. In older versions of Parallels Desktop, games like ‘Smelter’ were nearly unplayable due to poor graphics performance. It was very similar to playing this game on a Windows PC. I tested the game ‘Smelter’ and noticed no drop frames. These improvements in the graphics department are most apparent in games that use OpenGL for 2D graphics.
In addition to performance improvements, the new driver boosts the frame rate in many Windows games for a greater gaming experience and provides better synchronization with the Mac display. Graphics speed improvementsĪn improved display driver in Parallels Desktop 17 delivers much smoother Windows UI responsiveness and synchronized video playback. Indeed you can run several older versions of macOS as well, including macOS Big Sur 11, macOS Catalina 10.15, macOS Mojave 10.14 and macOS High Sierra 10.13. This is obviously a little disappointing right now since Monterey is in beta, but for use cases down the road it’s not a problem. One of the only downsides to this is you must be running Monterey on your host Mac to set up Monterey in a virtual machine.
You can also install macOS Monterey as a virtual machine using Parallels 17. Not only is it easy to install Windows 11, but it also carries over all the popular Parallels features from Windows 10.
I’ve run Windows 11 Pro on my 2018 Intel Macbook Pro using Parallels 17, with no issues so far.
You can currently run Windows 11 on Parallels Desktop 17 by first installing Windows 10 and then joining the Windows Insider Program. Newly optimized for Windows 11 and macOS Monterey, Parallels Desktop continues to stay up to date so you can keep working without interruption - even when a new macOS, Windows or Linux release pops up. Optimized for Windows 11 and macOS Monterey Below are what I think are the five most important new features from a usability perspective.
I couldn’t possibly do justice to every new feature in this review, so I’ve chosen a few important ones to highlight. Parallels Desktop 17 obviously has a lot of new features. What’s new in Parallels Desktop 17 for Mac