Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac review

Apart from support for virtual Lion machines, there’s little in version 7’s feature list to tempt existing Parallels Desktop users into upgrading to version 7, not least since its main Mac OS X integration features are already available in version 6. However, version 7 does promise some performance improvements. 2D performance is little better than before, according to our benchmarks, but Parallels Desktop 7 is still no slouch. When running our cross-platform benchmark suite natively under OS X Lion, our 2.93GHz Core 2 Duo iMac with 8GB RAM scored 44 overall overall (an Intel Core i5-2500K PC with 4GB RAM scores 100).

Parallels Desktop 7 Coherence mode opens guest OS windows directly on the OS X Desktop, complete with optional Taskbar

A Windows 7 Boot Camp installation on the same machine scored 36. Meanwhile, a 32-bit Windows 7 virtual machine, configured with two processors and 4GB RAM, scored 28 overall – slightly more than a budget AMD Llano laptop such as the AMD A4-3310MX-equipped HP Pavilion DV7-6101sa. This isn’t quick enough for video editing, but normal desktop tasks and some light image-editing will be fine.

Our benchmarks show applications in Parallels run about two-thirds the speed they do natively in Mac OS

3D performance, however, is significantly improved. A Parallels Desktop 6 Windows 7 machine with one processor, 1GB RAM and the maximum 256MB of video RAM averaged just 9fps in Call of Duty 4 at 1024 x 768, but the same setup in Parallels Desktop 7 averaged 30fps – the frame rate also stayed at this high level when we increased the resolution to 1,440 x 1,050. Increasing the virtual machine’s specification to two processors, 4GB RAM and the newly increased maximum 1GB video RAM barely made any difference to the frame rate.

Boot Camp may reduce the need for Mac virtualisation software, but Parallels Desktop offers a better way to make Windows applications accessible without a reboot — and multiple OS installations accessible at the same time. Significantly improved 3D performance and Mac OS X Lion virtualisation are the only real improvements over version 6, though, so unless you fancy playing some PC-only games there’s little reason to upgrade.