Parallels 3.0 for Mac: 3D GPU emulation confirmed (with screenshots)
Dan Warne01 June 2007, 1:41 AM
Popular virtualisation company Parallels has announced version 3.0 of Parallels Workstation for Mac with long-anticipated GPU acceleration and several other tasty features.
Parallels has announced version 3.0 of its popular Mac virtualisation package, offering long-anticipated emulation of 3D accelerated GPUs, allowing high-end Windows games to run in virtualisation.
The company said it was just weeks away from the new release and named several key selling points:
 Smartselect: the ability to associate a document on the OS X file structure to open in a Windows program, and vice versa. No more laborious switching to the virtualised OS and navigating to the file you want to open in your Mac shared folders... |
 3D GPU emulation: Parallels is also touting the ability to "run the hottest games and graphics applications" with 3D with support for graphics software. (Shown here, Quake 4 running in virtualised Windows XP) |
 Snapshot manager: Take a snapshot of your virtual machine and roll back to it easily if you screw something up. Like drive reimagine without the drive...! |
Other features called out by the company include:
- The company also promised the ability to browse through Windows folders in the virtual machine file, without launching Windows itself.
- New Linux tools for 'seamless' integration between OS X and virtualised Linux
- Expanded support for USB 2.0 devices (hopefully more mobile phones are supported!)
- USB connection assistant that automatically senses the type of device you've plugged in and connects it to either OS X or your virtualised operating system, depending on what you've chosen in the past.
- Significant performance enhancements and better audio quality
- Shared printers for 'cross-OS' printing
- Better security against mishaps, with configurable levels of 'rollback-ability'
- Read-only virtual machines
Parallels Inc is offering $10 off the normal upgrade price to existing registered users of Parallels for a week only, bringing the cost down to $US39.99 ($A48.28). After this time, upgrades will cost $49.99 and full licences will cost $79.99. It will give the upgrade away free to customers who purchased Parallels after May 1, 2007.
The company hasn't announced anything about the Windows or Linux versions of Parallels.
There's further information about Parallels 3.0 at the Parallels website.
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