Highball › Compare › Highball vs Parallels Desktop for gaming on Apple Silicon

Highball vs Parallels Desktop for gaming

Both let you play Windows games on an Apple Silicon Mac, by completely different routes.

Parallels Desktop runs a real, licensed copy of Windows 11 for ARM inside a virtual machine. Highball has no Windows in it at all. It translates the Windows API calls a game makes into macOS calls, and its DirectX into Metal, in one ordinary Mac process.

The double translation tax

Your Mac is ARM. Almost every Windows game is x86-64. Something has to bridge that gap, and in a VM two separate things do.

• Microsoft's Prism emulator, running inside the Windows guest, turns the game's x86 instructions into ARM ones.
• Parallels' paravirtual GPU driver then carries the game's DirectX calls across the hypervisor boundary and turns them into Metal.

All of it inside a virtual machine with a fixed slice of your CPU cores and RAM, next to a second operating system that is also running, updating and indexing while you play.

Highball skips the second boundary. No guest OS, no hypervisor, no virtual GPU. To be fair: x86 game code still has to become ARM code under Highball too, so that cost is not free on either side. What disappears is everything else, plus the tens of gigabytes of Windows on your disk.

Tom's Guide tried gaming in a VM on an M1 Max and titled the piece "it was a disaster". The graphics driver has improved a lot since then. The architecture they were fighting has not.

No DirectX 12 in the VM

Parallels' guest graphics driver supports DirectX up to 11.1. Parallels Desktop 27, released 2026-08-25, shipped a Metal-based OpenGL 4.3 driver that Parallels claims is up to 2.6x faster than the old one. Real engineering, aimed at professional apps. There is still no DirectX 12 path in the VM.

Highball switches renderers per bottle. D3DMetal, which comes from Apple's Game Porting Toolkit, and DXMT both cover DirectX 12; DXVK handles the older DirectX versions. If a game is DX12-only, a VM cannot run it and Highball can at least try.

Honest caveat on that switching: the compatibility database currently has zero games with two dated renderer verdicts, so there is no data yet telling you which renderer is faster for a given title. You switch and you test. How the data is built.

Anti-cheat is a wash

A virtual machine does not rescue Fortnite or Valorant. Kernel-level anti-cheat wants to load a Windows kernel driver and inspect the machine, and it treats a hypervisor guest as hostile. Parallels' own support pages admit games with anti-cheat may fail to launch, which does not stop their gaming page from showcasing Warzone and Rocket League.

Highball's position is identical, just stated earlier: 39 games in the database are marked blocked by kernel anti-cheat and flagged in your library before you download anything. Userspace anti-cheat is a per-title question, not a blanket no. Helldivers 2 runs under translation, and so does Elden Ring's single-player. Full explanation here.

Side by side

Where Parallels is genuinely better

Onboarding. Nothing else in the category is close. First launch offers to fetch Windows 11 for you, downloads the ARM image, installs it, installs the guest tools and lands you at a working desktop. No ISO hunting, no configuration. They have refined that flow since 2006 and it is why a million people pay for it. Highball's equivalent first run is days old.

It runs everything. A VM is a whole PC, so every launcher and every Windows program works, including the ones Highball cannot. Launchers built on the embedded Chromium framework, which includes GOG Galaxy, Ubisoft Connect and the Rockstar launcher, do not work under Highball right now. That is an engine-level bug filed upstream, not a setting you can flip.

Coherence mode. Windows apps as ordinary Mac windows, no Windows desktop visible. Still the best demo in the product.

Trust signals. Parallels is Microsoft's only authorized third-party way to run Windows 11 on Apple Silicon, is listed on Microsoft's own support pages, carries SOC 2, and has a phone number. Highball is one developer, a notarized DMG and a GitHub repo. That difference matters to some people and it should.

When a VM is the right answer

• Windows software that is not a game. Line-of-business apps, CAD, anything expecting real Windows services. Highball is not trying to serve this and you should not make it.
• You need the full Windows desktop. File Explorer, drivers, a domain-joined machine, a Windows-only development environment.
• A launcher Highball cannot run. If your library lives in GOG Galaxy or Ubisoft Connect, today the VM is your option.
• You want a vendor to call. Fair.

If you need a VM but the price stings, VMware Fusion has been free for all users, commercial included, since November 2024: DirectX 11-class 3D, without Microsoft's authorization or Parallels' polish. UTM is free and open source but has no 3D acceleration for Windows guests, so it is a non-starter for games.

Which should you use

For gaming specifically, the VM is the worst-value option on the board: roughly $100 a year plus a Windows licence, to get a DirectX 11 ceiling, two layers of translation and the same anti-cheat failures you would get for free. Try Highball first: notarized DMG, auto-updating, Apple Silicon and macOS 14 or newer.

Do not pick Highball if you need Windows itself rather than a game, if your games live in a launcher it cannot start yet, or if you want a support contract instead of a GitHub issue tracker. Those are real reasons and Parallels answers them properly. Its 14-day trial is long enough to check.

Check the specific game before you spend money either way. The database has 101 curated entries, 5 of them verified by hand on real hardware, plus 12,491 ProtonDB-derived predictions, labelled as predictions rather than dressed up as tests.

Download Highball Free. Install guide · Check your game · Other comparisons