Virtualisation performance on M4

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

I’m considering getting an M4 Mini and loading a few older OS’s onto it, mainly for playing around with (though mostly for older PC games, Windows XP to 10). Does anyone have experience of using these on M4? If so, what is the performance like?

Thanks!

 

[haralds]

Apple Silicon virtual machines are only able to support ARM Windows 11. That does run x86 apps using translation similar to Rosetta.
If you want to check into older games, you should try Crossover.

 

[bradman83]

I have an installation of Windows 11 ARM running in Parallels on an M1 Pro MBP. (CPU performance will be superior on the M4 but GPU performance might lag slightly based on Geekbench). I use it to run a variety of older games like Galactic Civilizations II and III and they all run fine. I've even gotten old DOS/Win 95 era games to run on Windows on ARM. Newer and more demanding titles from the past 10 years will struggle though.

There are also ARM versions of certain Linux distros like Ubuntu that you can install on Parallels with a decent selection of native software (note ARM Linux distros don't typically include any emulation for x86 apps).

You can also check out UTM, which is based the open source QEMU emulator engine but provides a free, open source GUI to make configuration easier. You can emulate a variety of older CPU architectures and run a variety of older OS's on it, including Classic Mac OS 8/9, early PowerPC versions of Mac OS X, Windows 95, etc. Because it's true emulation and not nearly as optimized as Rosetta or even Parallels I wouldn't recommend anything past Windows XP or Mac OS X 10.3 otherwise performance will be abysmal, but OS's from the late 90's/early 00's do okay on modern hardware, though I admittedly haven't tried any games on them. Still it's free so no harm in trying.

 

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

I have an installation of Windows 11 ARM running in Parallels on an M1 Pro MBP. (CPU performance will be superior on the M4 but GPU performance might lag slightly based on Geekbench). I use it to run a variety of older games like Galactic Civilizations II and III and they all run fine. I've even gotten old DOS/Win 95 era games to run on Windows on ARM. Newer and more demanding titles from the past 10 years will struggle though.

There are also ARM versions of certain Linux distros like Ubuntu that you can install on Parallels with a decent selection of native software (note ARM Linux distros don't typically include any emulation for x86 apps).

You can also check out UTM, which is based the open source QEMU emulator engine but provides a free, open source GUI to make configuration easier. You can emulate a variety of older CPU architectures and run a variety of older OS's on it, including Classic Mac OS 8/9, early PowerPC versions of Mac OS X, Windows 95, etc. Because it's true emulation and not nearly as optimized as Rosetta or even Parallels I wouldn't recommend anything past Windows XP or Mac OS X 10.3 otherwise performance will be abysmal, but OS's from the late 90's/early 00's do okay on modern hardware, though I admittedly haven't tried any games on them. Still it's free so no harm in trying.

This is great, thanks for the info!

 

[Honza1]

You can install x86 version of Windows on AMR64 Mx chips under Parallels (https://docs.parallels.com/pdfm-ug-...intel-virtual-machine-on-an-apple-silicon-mac). If you can install old versions you mentioned and not the ones listed here, I do not know. If you should even try it, I do not know and suspect there are better things to do with free time. But at least some x86 Windows can be run under Rosetta2 with help of Parallels.
On the other hand, my M1 runs ARM64 versions of Windows great under Parallels and VM Fusion. And that runs x86 applications perfectly fine, even those requiring high performance (cpu-vise). I am sure M4 is even better.