Don't look now, but Parallels is back with the final release of Parallels Desktop 4.0 today. The release, which we heard a little bit about in September, does indeed now have full support for DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2.0, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. The Parallels team claims that Desktop 4.0 has gotten a complete performance makeover—one that might very well give Fusion a run for its money.
Anyone who has used both virtualization packages for the Mac knows that, while Parallels was indeed the first on the scene when Apple went Intel, it has lagged way behind when it comes to performance. This has allegedly been fixed in a major way with this new release, however. Parallels senior product marketing manager Rawee Kambhiranond told Ars that, to truly meet the needs of business users and high-end hobbyists, the company needed to improve upon performance. "Most people think about innovation, people talk about performance and footprint," he said.
Let's skip straight to the numbers. Parallels Desktop 4.0 now has 50 percent faster performance than the previous version of the software, according to the company. Additionally, the team has improved upon battery life when using Parallels on a notebook, giving users back about 20 percent of their typical battery life while running a virtual machine. We'll be testing out these claims to see just how true they are in our own review of Desktop 4.0, but for now, we're optimistic.
In addition to the performance improvements, Parallels has made improvements to the hyervisor engine and memory overcommit features. Version 4.0 of Desktop now has support for four-way SMP, and experimental support for eight-way SMP. As mentioned above (and as we saw in September), the new version has support for DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2.0, but video graphics support has also been upped to 256MB. "This is comfortable for at least casual use of gaming, but neither we nor VMware have nailed it just yet," Kambhiranond told us. "If you're a hardcore gamer, you'll probably still be using a native install."
