v1.5 [Feb 8, 2020]
This is a major update for Parallels Desktop™. We made it more stable, secure and comfortable to use—and it’s compatible with macOS® 10.15 Catalina. The product has been renamed to Parallels Desktop. Though some features of Parallels Desktop™ for Mac are still unavailable in this App Store edition, the new version contains the following new features, fixes and improvements.
macOS 10.15 Catalina
- Use “Sign in with Apple” to create a Parallels account.
- Get improved support for Apple Pencil® drawing capabilities when you work with Windows applications on an iPad® using Sidecar.
- Tilt support for Apple Pencil
- Double-tap Apple Pencil to get new Touch Bar™ options
- Toggle between Pen, Eraser and Mouse modes
- Easily take a snip, enable Windows Tablet mode or open the Windows onscreen keyboard from Touch Bar
Graphics
- With the help of Apple Metal®, Parallels introduces support for DirectX® 11. Now you can run Autodesk 3ds Max 2020, Lumion, ArcGIS Pro 2.3, products from MasterSeries and more.
- Play popular games including Madden NFL 19, Age of Empires: Definitive Edition, Anno 2205, Railway Empire, Space Engineers, Frostpunk, Risk of Rain 2 and many more.
- DirectX 3D graphics are now accelerated by the Apple Metal engine.
- Enjoy enhanced compatibility with new Linux distributions due to Virtio GPU. This supports sliding mouse (Parallels Desktop captures the mouse cursor), dynamic resolution (the screen resolution changes dynamically if you resize the virtual machine window) and multimonitor support—even without Parallels Tools.
Performance
- Some applications can use DirectX 11 and thus are much faster, compared to being unusably slow in previous versions.
- 3D graphics are up to 15% faster.
- User interface is more responsive.
Hardware
- Support for non-volatile memory express (NVMe) disk controller—the next generation of storage controllers. NVMe is more virtualization friendly and effective than Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI). NVMe leverages not just solid-state storage (SSD) but also modern multicore CPUs.
- Support for Intel HDA audio card.
- Supports up to 8/2 channels (out/in), 192kHz sample rate and 32-bit samples.
- Improved sound quality of VoIP phones.
- Support for “jack sense”.
- Automatic detection when the microphone is muted. If access to the Mac microphone is not allowed by the user or macOS preferences, Windows shows the microphone as muted.
- Automatic detection when sound output is disabled. If it is disabled in the virtual machine settings, Windows also shows sound output as disabled.
- Support for Bluetooth Low Energy. This allows you to use more devices, including Logitech Craft, IrisPEN and some IoT devices (such as smart home appliances and smart bands).
- Version of the Bluetooth driver is 4.0.
Convenience
- When reverting to a snapshot, Parallels Desktop offers to save the current VM state as a new snapshot.
- Though dragging and dropping images has been supported from the very beginning, some of the latest macOS screenshots cannot be simply dragged to Windows because of the new format. We have enhanced drag-and-drop functionality—now you can drag screenshot previews, images from Safari, Photos and other macOS applications and drop them to your Windows applications.
- Completely redesigned keyboard layouts support several improved aspects, including:
- Excel shortcuts Ctrl+ and Ctrl- are now supported.
- Improved support for JIS keyboard.
- Fixed input with CAPS LOCK on for most of non-English layouts.
