Parallels can run x86 versions of Windows or Linux on Apple Silicon

13 hours ago (arstechnica.com)

Does this make gaming on the M4 Macs more viable now?

  • No because there’s no GPU virtualization and translation involved.

    Besides, if you wanted to play windows games on a Mac you’d use Crossover (or anything that wraps GPTk+wine like whisky). It’s significantly lower overhead than a VM, and GPU access is translated.

  • No because I can guarantee it's slower than the Windows x86/x64 emulation layer in the ARM version of Windows.

    • > Parallels notes that these operating systems currently run "really slow" due to the overhead required for translation. Windows takes between two and seven minutes to boot, depending on the speed of your Mac, and "the responsiveness of the operating system is low." Rather than attempting to multi-task, Parallels says you should close the app you're using before trying to open another one.

      I tried to run x86 Windows using UTM a while back (I was trying to test something that was x86-only and used a kernel driver, so couldn't run under ARM Windows). I had to give up on it because it was taking too long to boot (i.e. way longer than 7 minutes). So this sounds like an improvement.

      On the other hand, we've had success using UTM for students with Apple Silicon Macs to run our x86 Linux VM that we use in our 2nd year University operating systems course. It's terminal-only (no desktop environment), but we do use VS Code's Remote SSH with it (which runs the VS Code backend in it).