Rocket League and Parallels Technical Preview: An Early Look at Running Windows on M1 Macs

As I sit here playing Rocket League on my M1 Max MacBook, I have to admit that I'm both excited and skeptical about the possibilities of running Windows on these machines. The fact that the technical preview is already available for download is a significant step forward, but it's still early days for this new technology.

I decided to start by launching the Steam client and attempting to play Rocket League, which is a graphically intensive game that should be a good test for the performance of the M1 chip. I clicked on the "Play" button and waited for the game to load, and while it's not running at 60 frames per second, it's still playable. In fact, it's quite smooth, considering the relatively low specs of the machine.

I have to admit that I'm impressed by how well Rocket League is performing, given that this is a technical preview build and the M1 chip is still a relatively new platform for Windows. The performance is not perfect, but it's definitely usable, which is more than I expected at this stage. To further test the machine, I also decided to try out some other apps, including Affinity Photo, which is my favorite photo editing app on the Mac.

Unfortunately, as I soon discovered, running 32-bit applications on an M1 Mac is not possible at present. When I tried to launch the Microsoft Store or Skype, both of these popular apps crashed immediately, suggesting that there's still a lot of work to be done before we can run all our favorite Windows apps natively on these machines.

However, the lack of support for 32-bit apps is not a major blow, as many of my favorite games and applications are already available in their 64-bit versions. In fact, when I launched TrackMania, an old favorite that has been ported to 64-bit, it ran smoothly on the M1 chip, with only minor performance issues.

To test the machine further, I decided to try out some other popular games and see how they performed. While not all of them are yet playable at high frame rates, many of them still run remarkably well, considering the relatively low specs of the M1 chip.

Geekbench 5 is a useful tool for measuring the performance of a machine's CPU, and I was pleased to find that my M1 Max MacBook is performing reasonably well in both single-core and multi-core tests. The scores may not be spectacular compared to some of the top-tier Windows machines out there, but they're certainly impressive given the relatively low specs of this particular machine.

As I continue to experiment with different apps and games on my M1 Mac, I'm starting to get a sense of just how much potential this technology has. While it's still early days, and there are certainly many challenges to overcome before we can run Windows natively on these machines, the fact that we're already seeing playable versions of popular games is a significant step forward.

If you have an M1 Max MacBook and are wondering whether you should try out the Parallels technical preview for running Windows on your machine, I'd say go for it. While there may be some limitations to the current version, the fact that we're already seeing playable versions of popular games is a significant step forward, and it's likely that the experience will only improve over time.

What do you think? Are you interested in running Windows on your M1 Max MacBook? Let me know in the comments below. And if you have any questions or concerns about this technology, I'd be happy to try and answer them as well.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin this video i'm going to show you how to get the windows 10 on arm insider preview running on parallels desktop 16 for m1 mac technical preview so basically we're creating a windows virtual machine running on the parallels desktop tech preview so the name of the game here is preview it's not something you should rely on for any sort of mission critical work whatsoever but i was surprised at how well it worked already this early in the game so to get all this work in you're going to need a few things first of all you're going to need windows 10 on arm insider preview so you're you'll need to be a windows insider to download that and you also need to be a windows insider to get the latest dev build that allows you to run emulated x64 apps so you will need a microsoft account to make that happen and you also need an account for parallels in order to get the technical preview working as well other than that though as long as you have an m1 macbook air macbook pro or mac mini you should be relatively good to go so let's go ahead and get started so the first thing you want to do is head over to parallels website i'll have the link down below in the description and you want to download the technical preview you will need to register with parallels in order to get to this page so just keep that in mind and there are some things you need to know about this whole setup number one it requires a mac with an m1 chip that much is obvious but it also requires an operating system that's arm based so you cannot use an x86 based operating system like you would normally do when running parallels on an intel based mac so that's why we need to use the windows 10 on arm insider preview so along with the inability of using an x86 based operating system in this vm is also not possible to resume or suspend your session you need to shut down windows instead and lastly arm32 apps do not work when you try to launch them they'll crash immediately so keep that in mind so you want to copy your activation key because parallels will ask you that upon the installation and then you want to go ahead and click the download button to download parallels desktop 16 for m1 max to your desktop or to your download folder whatever the case may be now you want to go to the windows insider page you want to make sure you're registered for windows insider because that's the only way you'll be able to download the windows insider preview for arm 64 so you can just click this button right here to initiate that download so once you have parallels downloaded and the windows 10 arm64 insider preview downloaded it's time to get started with the fun stuff so here is parallel's desktop you're just going to double click on that to mount the dmg once you do that you just double click on the install button there go ahead and click open and we'll give it a second and i do speed up a lot of things throughout this tutorial so you're not kept waiting so just be patient if it's taking a little bit longer on your end all right so you want to uncheck where it says optimal just uncheck that on the sla click accept put in your username and password and it's initializing parallels desktop and then you'll be met with an introductory screen this kind of goes over some of the requirements and limitations that we already discussed so just go ahead and click the continue button in the bottom right hand corner and then you want to drag the windows image that you downloaded the extension should be vhdx just drag it and drop it on top of the installation assistant and then click create and that should create and configure windows 10 now i have sped this up quite a bit as you can see so just be patient because it's going to take a little bit of time on your end to make this work all right so it's going to go through and set up devices and kind of get everything started as far as configuration is concerned there all right so we're looking good to go here thus far so we're running windows 10 on our m1 mac now the first thing i recommend doing at least initially uh in this early stage of the game is to go up to actions and go to configure and then you want to go to the options page select more options and then for time change it to do not sync if you don't do this at least in this initial early version then you may find that windows becomes unresponsive at least i did all right so once you do that you should be good the next thing you want to do is just go ahead and maximize your screen so we have enough screen real estate here and then we want to take some next steps to get x64 emulation working on windows 10 on arm so to do that you want to go ahead in the search box type in insider and then you want to select the windows insider program settings so just click on that and then to enable the windows insider program you have to enable diagnostic and feedback settings so just go ahead and click on that link and then under optional diagnostic data turn the switch to own all right go back and then click where it says link a windows insider account select microsoft account and then put in your username and password for your microsoft account you should have already created this to download the windows 10 on arm developer preview anyway all right so that's what i'm doing right here and i'm logged in so just click next and there you go so you want to click where it says beta channel because we want to switch that over to the dev channel to get the really bleeding edge update so click dev channel and then click the home button and then we're going to search for the latest updates so you want to go to update in security and check for updates so click that button and this should surface the latest dev update which includes the x64 emulation which was just recently added so there we go there is the windows 10 insider preview 2279.1 you want to click where it says download and install and this will take a while okay so your version number may be different if you're watching this video a little bit later and it's possible if not likely that microsoft will introduce the x64 emulation in a more publicly accessible version in other words some of the nitty gritty details may be a little bit different when you get to this tutorial so just keep that in mind so the installation like i said does take a while i've sped this up quite a bit but it's still taking a little bit of time here as you can see so now it's complete and now it is just a matter of restarting our virtual machine now you will see a little restart notification in the bottom right hand corner as well you can click either restart button to get started so we'll just go up here to the windows update click restart now and it'll restart just like that and then as you restart you'll notice it'll complete the installation process and this too will take a little bit of time so just be patient so once the installation is complete it's going to want to reinstall parallels tools you'll notice that perhaps in the upper left hand corner there we go so parallels tools installation so just let that complete as well and this will take a little bit time you need to restart again and that's what we just did all right obviously i sped that up again so now we're good so let's go ahead and run some applications first of all we'll just open up microsoft edge and we'll see if the internet works let's try that first all right so we'll just type in nine to five mac.com and yep so there we go nine to five mac load it right up in microsoft edge and we can just browse around like that works perfectly fine internet works great so while we're here might as well just go ahead and download steam and check out that and see see how games run so we're going to go ahead and do that now install steam install and then click run and we'll get that installed yes so while we're getting this installed let me know what do you guys think about the m1 max it's been you know a little while now that we've had these macs what do you guys think about them thus far how are you liking them i personally love my mac mini that i'm using i love the macbook air and pro i think they're all great machines in their own right so i have steam installed we're going to go ahead and download the latest version of microsoft edge which is based on chromium and we're gonna go ahead and run that as well all right so we got the latest version of edge and this is a lot better let's see if we can play a 4k video all right so here is my ios 14.4 beta changes and features video and it is playing back just like that let's go ahead and go full screen and works pretty well 4k full screen playback only windows 10 for arm virtual machine running on parallels on an m1 mac so i mean what do you guys think so i've been downloading rocket league on steam and it's finally complete so let's go ahead and play rocket league or at least attempt to play rocket league here on this virtual machine just go ahead and click play on steam say yes and i'm definitely not holding my breath on this one because oh well okay so there we go uh it is loaded up and you can see it does look like it's going to be playable at least perhaps we'll see definitely not going to expect great performance on on the mac mini on this first generation m1 chip but we'll see if it's at least playable i would be i'd be uh i'd be impressed to be honest with you so um have the settings turned down a little bit let's go to custom games exhibition and let's go ahead and create a match and see what we can get going here all right so let's go ahead and join um i mean it looks pretty good and let's see how it actually plays though oh it's definitely not 60 frames per second right but um i mean i think it's playable i think it's playable what do you guys think i mean it's i mean let's be honest it's rocket league it's not exactly the most graphically intense game out there and it's still kind of struggling but again this is just i mean this is super early i mean this is a technical preview both on on the windows side of things and on the parallel side of things and yet it still is able to run and we're running like the bleeding edge dev build which gives you that x64 compatibility because before that if you didn't have that that dev build installed you couldn't play rocket league at all because it requires x64 emulation and what i do recommend is bumping up the allocation of course for the virtual machine from two to four and that should help out performance a little bit as well um and yeah so again it's super early but the fact is it works and if there's like an application that you run on windows that you absolutely need it's good to know that hey if i needed it i could at least get it here using the parallels technical preview along with the windows for arm so in my opinion it's just nice to know that yes if i if i had an application i needed to run i could do so even though there's no boot camp for m1 max so that kind of is just nice to think about or just nice to know in the back of your head that that is possible so i have geekbench 5 here we're going to try that out here and see how that works out and 1490 for single core 4808 for multi-core that's actually pretty decent given the circumstances what do you guys think so i also wanted to try out some other apps so i downloaded affinity photo which is my favorite photo editing app on the mac it's multi-platform so available on windows as well and the performance wasn't great but it was definitely usable and one of the downsides to this setup is that rm32 apps do not work so for instance if i launch something like the microsoft store or skype the built-in skype for windows 10 it just won't load up it'll crash immediately so the microsoft store click that it dies immediately so again arm 32 apps do not work at this stage of the game perhaps in the future there will be a workaround or some other way to use these applications but right now they don't work so let's go back to steam let's try another game just just to try it let's try track mania it's been a long time since i played this game i'm gonna go ahead and install it click next and speed it up a little bit there we go alrighty so let's go ahead and play see what we get see if it even works at all and maybe maybe maybe not maybe not um maybe we'll see oh yeah it does work so um actually it looks pretty decent we'll see how it plays though that's the question oh i forgot my controls okay it's taking me a while to get used to the controls on the keyboard uh that plays pretty well what do you guys think so i mean this is still super early that's sort of the the name of the game it's super early yet even at this early stage i've been impressed by uh windows 10 running on an m1 mac via parallels technical preview so what do you guys think are you interested in running windows on your m1 max are you just are you over windows and you don't want anything to do with it now that boot camp is no more let me know down below in the comment section and if you have any questions or concerns also let me know or just suggestions as well because i'm not claiming to be an expert at this at all but i hope this video was able to help you and check the description for more details this is jeff with nine to five macin this video i'm going to show you how to get the windows 10 on arm insider preview running on parallels desktop 16 for m1 mac technical preview so basically we're creating a windows virtual machine running on the parallels desktop tech preview so the name of the game here is preview it's not something you should rely on for any sort of mission critical work whatsoever but i was surprised at how well it worked already this early in the game so to get all this work in you're going to need a few things first of all you're going to need windows 10 on arm insider preview so you're you'll need to be a windows insider to download that and you also need to be a windows insider to get the latest dev build that allows you to run emulated x64 apps so you will need a microsoft account to make that happen and you also need an account for parallels in order to get the technical preview working as well other than that though as long as you have an m1 macbook air macbook pro or mac mini you should be relatively good to go so let's go ahead and get started so the first thing you want to do is head over to parallels website i'll have the link down below in the description and you want to download the technical preview you will need to register with parallels in order to get to this page so just keep that in mind and there are some things you need to know about this whole setup number one it requires a mac with an m1 chip that much is obvious but it also requires an operating system that's arm based so you cannot use an x86 based operating system like you would normally do when running parallels on an intel based mac so that's why we need to use the windows 10 on arm insider preview so along with the inability of using an x86 based operating system in this vm is also not possible to resume or suspend your session you need to shut down windows instead and lastly arm32 apps do not work when you try to launch them they'll crash immediately so keep that in mind so you want to copy your activation key because parallels will ask you that upon the installation and then you want to go ahead and click the download button to download parallels desktop 16 for m1 max to your desktop or to your download folder whatever the case may be now you want to go to the windows insider page you want to make sure you're registered for windows insider because that's the only way you'll be able to download the windows insider preview for arm 64 so you can just click this button right here to initiate that download so once you have parallels downloaded and the windows 10 arm64 insider preview downloaded it's time to get started with the fun stuff so here is parallel's desktop you're just going to double click on that to mount the dmg once you do that you just double click on the install button there go ahead and click open and we'll give it a second and i do speed up a lot of things throughout this tutorial so you're not kept waiting so just be patient if it's taking a little bit longer on your end all right so you want to uncheck where it says optimal just uncheck that on the sla click accept put in your username and password and it's initializing parallels desktop and then you'll be met with an introductory screen this kind of goes over some of the requirements and limitations that we already discussed so just go ahead and click the continue button in the bottom right hand corner and then you want to drag the windows image that you downloaded the extension should be vhdx just drag it and drop it on top of the installation assistant and then click create and that should create and configure windows 10 now i have sped this up quite a bit as you can see so just be patient because it's going to take a little bit of time on your end to make this work all right so it's going to go through and set up devices and kind of get everything started as far as configuration is concerned there all right so we're looking good to go here thus far so we're running windows 10 on our m1 mac now the first thing i recommend doing at least initially uh in this early stage of the game is to go up to actions and go to configure and then you want to go to the options page select more options and then for time change it to do not sync if you don't do this at least in this initial early version then you may find that windows becomes unresponsive at least i did all right so once you do that you should be good the next thing you want to do is just go ahead and maximize your screen so we have enough screen real estate here and then we want to take some next steps to get x64 emulation working on windows 10 on arm so to do that you want to go ahead in the search box type in insider and then you want to select the windows insider program settings so just click on that and then to enable the windows insider program you have to enable diagnostic and feedback settings so just go ahead and click on that link and then under optional diagnostic data turn the switch to own all right go back and then click where it says link a windows insider account select microsoft account and then put in your username and password for your microsoft account you should have already created this to download the windows 10 on arm developer preview anyway all right so that's what i'm doing right here and i'm logged in so just click next and there you go so you want to click where it says beta channel because we want to switch that over to the dev channel to get the really bleeding edge update so click dev channel and then click the home button and then we're going to search for the latest updates so you want to go to update in security and check for updates so click that button and this should surface the latest dev update which includes the x64 emulation which was just recently added so there we go there is the windows 10 insider preview 2279.1 you want to click where it says download and install and this will take a while okay so your version number may be different if you're watching this video a little bit later and it's possible if not likely that microsoft will introduce the x64 emulation in a more publicly accessible version in other words some of the nitty gritty details may be a little bit different when you get to this tutorial so just keep that in mind so the installation like i said does take a while i've sped this up quite a bit but it's still taking a little bit of time here as you can see so now it's complete and now it is just a matter of restarting our virtual machine now you will see a little restart notification in the bottom right hand corner as well you can click either restart button to get started so we'll just go up here to the windows update click restart now and it'll restart just like that and then as you restart you'll notice it'll complete the installation process and this too will take a little bit of time so just be patient so once the installation is complete it's going to want to reinstall parallels tools you'll notice that perhaps in the upper left hand corner there we go so parallels tools installation so just let that complete as well and this will take a little bit time you need to restart again and that's what we just did all right obviously i sped that up again so now we're good so let's go ahead and run some applications first of all we'll just open up microsoft edge and we'll see if the internet works let's try that first all right so we'll just type in nine to five mac.com and yep so there we go nine to five mac load it right up in microsoft edge and we can just browse around like that works perfectly fine internet works great so while we're here might as well just go ahead and download steam and check out that and see see how games run so we're going to go ahead and do that now install steam install and then click run and we'll get that installed yes so while we're getting this installed let me know what do you guys think about the m1 max it's been you know a little while now that we've had these macs what do you guys think about them thus far how are you liking them i personally love my mac mini that i'm using i love the macbook air and pro i think they're all great machines in their own right so i have steam installed we're going to go ahead and download the latest version of microsoft edge which is based on chromium and we're gonna go ahead and run that as well all right so we got the latest version of edge and this is a lot better let's see if we can play a 4k video all right so here is my ios 14.4 beta changes and features video and it is playing back just like that let's go ahead and go full screen and works pretty well 4k full screen playback only windows 10 for arm virtual machine running on parallels on an m1 mac so i mean what do you guys think so i've been downloading rocket league on steam and it's finally complete so let's go ahead and play rocket league or at least attempt to play rocket league here on this virtual machine just go ahead and click play on steam say yes and i'm definitely not holding my breath on this one because oh well okay so there we go uh it is loaded up and you can see it does look like it's going to be playable at least perhaps we'll see definitely not going to expect great performance on on the mac mini on this first generation m1 chip but we'll see if it's at least playable i would be i'd be uh i'd be impressed to be honest with you so um have the settings turned down a little bit let's go to custom games exhibition and let's go ahead and create a match and see what we can get going here all right so let's go ahead and join um i mean it looks pretty good and let's see how it actually plays though oh it's definitely not 60 frames per second right but um i mean i think it's playable i think it's playable what do you guys think i mean it's i mean let's be honest it's rocket league it's not exactly the most graphically intense game out there and it's still kind of struggling but again this is just i mean this is super early i mean this is a technical preview both on on the windows side of things and on the parallel side of things and yet it still is able to run and we're running like the bleeding edge dev build which gives you that x64 compatibility because before that if you didn't have that that dev build installed you couldn't play rocket league at all because it requires x64 emulation and what i do recommend is bumping up the allocation of course for the virtual machine from two to four and that should help out performance a little bit as well um and yeah so again it's super early but the fact is it works and if there's like an application that you run on windows that you absolutely need it's good to know that hey if i needed it i could at least get it here using the parallels technical preview along with the windows for arm so in my opinion it's just nice to know that yes if i if i had an application i needed to run i could do so even though there's no boot camp for m1 max so that kind of is just nice to think about or just nice to know in the back of your head that that is possible so i have geekbench 5 here we're going to try that out here and see how that works out and 1490 for single core 4808 for multi-core that's actually pretty decent given the circumstances what do you guys think so i also wanted to try out some other apps so i downloaded affinity photo which is my favorite photo editing app on the mac it's multi-platform so available on windows as well and the performance wasn't great but it was definitely usable and one of the downsides to this setup is that rm32 apps do not work so for instance if i launch something like the microsoft store or skype the built-in skype for windows 10 it just won't load up it'll crash immediately so the microsoft store click that it dies immediately so again arm 32 apps do not work at this stage of the game perhaps in the future there will be a workaround or some other way to use these applications but right now they don't work so let's go back to steam let's try another game just just to try it let's try track mania it's been a long time since i played this game i'm gonna go ahead and install it click next and speed it up a little bit there we go alrighty so let's go ahead and play see what we get see if it even works at all and maybe maybe maybe not maybe not um maybe we'll see oh yeah it does work so um actually it looks pretty decent we'll see how it plays though that's the question oh i forgot my controls okay it's taking me a while to get used to the controls on the keyboard uh that plays pretty well what do you guys think so i mean this is still super early that's sort of the the name of the game it's super early yet even at this early stage i've been impressed by uh windows 10 running on an m1 mac via parallels technical preview so what do you guys think are you interested in running windows on your m1 max are you just are you over windows and you don't want anything to do with it now that boot camp is no more let me know down below in the comment section and if you have any questions or concerns also let me know or just suggestions as well because i'm not claiming to be an expert at this at all but i hope this video was able to help you and check the description for more details this is jeff with nine to five mac\n"