It's that time of year: a new Windows release is coming, with Mac virtualization application updates in tow. You'd think there's only so much you could do with a program that hosts another OS, but these new updates are surprising for their innovation. With the previous release of VMware Fusion 5 Professional, VMware started differentiating its products from Parallels by tapping its established, IT-oriented features. On the other hand, Parallels is pushing closer Mac integration and better 3D graphics support. The latest releases seem to be in much the same vein, but that's enough talking around these releases—let's dive in.

Test Hardware

17-inch MacBook Pro 2.5GHz Sandy Bridge 16GB RAM



1GB Radeon 6770M



OS X 10.9 Mavericks builds 13A584 through golden master

13-inch mid-2011 MacBook Air 1.7GHz Core i5 4GB RAM



Intel HD 3000 384MB graphics



OS X 10.8.4

Since both VMware and Parallels are advertising support for Mavericks-ready features, I decided to run the MacBook Pro on Mavericks. (Luckily, the OS has been very stable and, toward the end of the review, became a release candidate). Any bugs in the earlier versions used would have been minor enough to not affect usability as client OSes or as a host for Parallels or VMware's software. And because Parallels Desktop 9 features Power Nap support, I needed to steal my girlfriend's MacBook Air to test it out.

We'll start with the individual features and then compare the two where the new features overlap (for example, Windows 8.1, Linux, and Mac OS X 10.9 client OS support). As usual, I won't be reviewing these programs from scratch, so readers who aren't sure how they currently stand should read our previous comparative reviews.

New Parallels Desktop 9 features

Parallels has always been good at bridging OS X and Windows with support for the newer features of the Mac OS. Version 9 is no different.

Mountain Lion (and later) dictionary support

Parallels Desktop 9 adds the OS X contextual dictionary support. As one of the more frequently used OS X writing tools, the contextual dictionary and thesaurus availability on Windows client VMs is definitely a welcome addition. If you are writing and want an alternate word for something you've written, just hit Command-Control-D, and you'll get a definition of your selected words as well as some synonyms.

It's a great tool. While it may not seem like a big addition, for those who use Dragon Dictate in Windows or Office in a VM, it's going to be invaluable. It's not always flawless, however.

But I only saw that once in a while. Otherwise, it's a shame this feature isn't available to other client OSes (although I don't think a lot of people are using Linux for Open Office).

Power Nap features

If you have a recent-ish portable Mac that supports Power Nap—the technology that lets your sleeping machine do tasks with one eye open while consuming minimal power—then Parallels Desktop 9 can take advantage of this by enabling updates to Windows VMs while asleep. To test it, I started a large Windows update and closed the lid of my Power Nap-capable MacBook Air and checked in occasionally to see its progress. Predictably, it moved much slower through the update tasks. Still, when I came back in the morning, the VM was up to date and had rebooted with the installed updates. Obviously, you don't get this type of thing for free in terms of power, so if you're worried about battery life, double-check in the system preferences that Power Nap is off on battery power—that is the default setting. Otherwise, this is a perfect example of something you'd like to do while sleeping a machine overnight, and Parallels definitely gets points for thinking ahead here. It's a shame it's not supported for OSes other than Windows, though.

Official DirectX 10 support

Parallels added experimental support for DirectX 10 in version 8 of Desktop, but as the “e" word implies, it wasn't stable and ready for prime time. Version 9 adds full support to DirectX 10, and seeing a new game like Bioshock Infinite run in a VM on high settings is pretty amazing for its technical accomplishments:

Bioshock Infinite in DirectX 10 executing flawlessly, if a bit pokily, in Parallels Desktop 9.

It's a slideshow at times, but it's still impressive for virtualization. Yes, there is a Mac version of this game, but I chose this program because of that limitation and because it comes with a benchmark utility.

In a similar vein to Fusion 5's addition of OpenGL support for Linux VMs, obtaining a top speed isn't as important as adding support since many apps simply refuse to run without it.

There are the rare professional 3D applications that default to DirectX in Windows—Autodesk's Max being the most high-profile example. It's likely that some of these will move their minimum requirements from DirectX 9.0c to DirectX 10 in the next few years to get more sophisticated real-time previews. Parallels has laid the difficult but much-needed groundwork to see it make it through this transition. I think that DirectX 11, which supports tessellation, will take a lot more work to implement in a virtualized GPU, but the user need for that is years away, thankfully. It's more pressing to support OpenGL 3 and above since 99.9 percent of professional 3D applications use OpenGL. Version 2.1—the maximum version supported by VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop—is getting old enough that we could see 3D applications for Windows and Linux require version 3 in the near future. High-end animation program Houdini already defaults to OpenGL 3 on Windows and Linux, and it will crash if you don't have a GL 3-capable card. CAD and CAM software display needs are basic enough that I don't think they will be foisting an OpenGL 3 requirement on their users for a much longer time to come.

DirectX 10 benchmark in Boot Camp and in a VM

It's not really playable at that framerate, but my 2011 MacBook Pro's aging 6770M doesn't do wonders in Boot Camp either. It was showing the exact same screen rendering as the AMD Catalyst drivers in Boot Camp from what I could tell, and that's impressive considering the shader complexity in Bioshock Infinite. If you're looking to play a Humble Indie Bundle-type game that's DirectX 10 only, Parallels Desktop 9 should work fine on recent hardware. I'm really curious to see how this will perform on the 2013 Mac Pro's FirePro GPU, which is basically a Radeon 7970 with oodles of ECC memory. Since there are two of them, I wonder if they will be able to implement CrossFire to use both GPUs in a virtual machine. Dare to nerdy dream.

Thunderbolt and Firewire drive mounting for VMs

When you connect a FireWire or Thunderbolt drive in Parallels Desktop 9, you get a prompt much like the USB device one that lets you mount them to the VM (while it still connects the Mac OS side the same way):

Once it mounts inside the VM, the name shows up correctly next to its drive letter in Windows, and you don't need to have an HFS+ driver, like MacDrive, installed to get read and write support. If you are daisy chaining devices on Thunderbolt, those work fine, and my 27-inch Dell screen still worked the same way passing through my Parallels-mounted Lacie 2big. At first, since you can already share drives to the VM, I was a little confused as to why this disk sharing scheme would be useful. Then I remembered those times that I needed to mount USB disks in the VM as disks to make boot disks, and it all made sense.

Cloud sync

I frequently test my Maya scripts for compatibility in Linux and Windows. They are already in my Dropbox folder, so it's a big boon to not have to set up redundant Dropbox installs for my VMs. Parallels automatically detects what cloud apps you have installed and sets up that environment for your client VMs. For Dropbox, SkyDrive, and Google Drive, I know I could just share that folder separately, but having the Dropbox folder readily available is a nice touch. The iCloud integration is the most interesting since it exposes the innards of iCloud as a filesystem, sort of FUSE style:

I tested iCloud saving and syncing with a basic RTF text file, and files saved from Wordpad in Windows 7 Pro worked fine when opened back up in OS X. It was a flawless experience overall. Still, I don't know if read/write access to your cloud data should be on by default since it raises potential data security issues you might not be aware of as a basic user. My only real complaint about the cloud integration features is that they are only available to Windows VMs. This seems to be a mantra that's growing increasingly loud at Parallels.