Odd performance issue in Parallels Desktop on Apple Silicon Mac

[Adamki2000]

Hi everyone! I know I'm a newbie here but I've read the forum extensively over the last several months and have learned how to use Hybrid pretty well. I also know that Selur doesn't own a Mac, which is why the Mac version no longer exists (huge bummer, although I'd happily volunteer my Mac as tribute if I could!), and that means that if I want to run Hybrid, I have to do so with virtualization. I've tried CrossOver, VMWare Fusion, and Parallels Desktop and Parallels has been the most flawless of the 3 so far.

On my 27" 10-core Intel i9 iMac with 128GB RAM, running the latest release of Hybrid in Parallels in Windows 11 and with the Vapoursynth settings I'm using, I'm getting somewhere around 10 to 11 fps encoding to ProRes 422 with a specific test clip. However, on my 16" MacBook Pro with an M1 Max and 64GB memory, running Hybrid in Parallels in Windows 11 ARM and the exact same settings and test clip, I'm getting barely 3.5 fps.

Now, I thought that maybe it was the fact that Parallels on the MacBook Pro, being an ARM-based machine and having to use the ARM variant of Windows 11, was running into issues because Hybrid is designed to take advantage of x86 architecture. Which is something the iMac has. I also made sure that the VMs on both machines were set up to tap into the same amount of CPU cores, and roughly the same amount of RAM. But when I went to run GeekBench 6 within Windows 11 on both machines just to see what it said performance was, I got scores of 1610 for single-core, and 6508 multi-core for the iMac, and got 2102 and 9919 on the MacBook Pro. Which means the MacBook Pro sure seems to be running Windows 11 faster than the iMac.

So, unless I'm missing something that I'm not accounting for, the only thing I can think of to explain the worse Hybrid performance on the MacBook Pro is that it (and/or the many dependencies it calls upon for use) just isn't optimized to run on Windows 11 for ARM.

Are there any other Mac users here that have been trying to get Hybrid working well on their Apple Silicon-based Macs and experiencing similar things? And yes, I would love to be able to get a dedicated PC strictly for just running Hybrid, but that's nowhere within reach of my budget for the foreseeable future.

Thanks for any help that can be given! And again, I'm sure I'm far from alone in the Mac camp that would love to see Hybrid brought back to the platform if at all possible.  Maybe we all need to just get together and chip in collectively so that Selur could finally have a modern Mac to develop it on!

Final thing I'll say though is a huge thanks to Selur and the rest of the community here for their continued efforts in making Hybrid the best that it can be. It's become an indispensable tool in my arsenal for deinterlacing lots of video footage with results that are jaw-droppingly good compared to anything else I've tried.

[Selur]

Could also be that Windows ARMs x86 emulation is not that good, hopefully some other MacUser can shed some light on this.

Cu Selur

[Adamki2000]

I think I figured it out. According to Parallels Desktop Help - Graphics Settings, the Metal API that Apple uses for GPU acceleration isn't yet available in Parallels Desktop on Apple Silicon Macs. That would explain why my Intel Mac is better at Hybrid than my M1 Max MacBook Pro.

I decided to try giving CrossOver another go after seeing someone else on these forums post about it a couple of years ago and it took some tinkering to get it to load up, but it works in macOS Sonoma 14.5. And, CrossOver does have Metal support so it actually works about 2x better than Parallels Desktop at the moment. Steps for anyone trying to install Hybrid via CrossOver:

• Download the latest version of Hybrid for Windows and install it into a new bottle in CrossOver.
• In the right-hand menu of the CrossOver window, enable both "D3DMetal" and "High Resolution Mode".
• Use Apple's TextEdit to create a plain text file named "misc.ini" with the following text:
[General]
#Allow running Hybrid as a user which has administrator rights (Windows only)
runAsAdmin=true
#Disable search for NVIDIA GPU
nonvidia=true
• Save the file. If macOS automatically adds the .txt extension to the end of the filename, just delete it and confirm that you want the extension to be .ini
• From the Finder menubar, select Go -> Go to Folder... and enter "~/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles/Hybrid xx-xx-20xx/drive_c/Program Files/Hybrid/
• Copy the .ini file to the Hybrid directory
• CrossOver should now allow Hybrid to boot normally. Without the .ini file added, CrossOver will fail to load Hybrid because it will yell at you that Hybrid can't run with admin rights.*

*If you try to start a job in Hybrid and it comes up with an error that there was a problem encountered with vspipe.exe, just try starting the job again. Usually it goes through the second time around just fine.

Here's to hoping that Parallels Desktop v20 adds Metal support for Apple Silicon Macs. CrossOver is decent but it's far from ideal since you're not running Hybrid inside a full Windows OS.

[Selur]

Happy you figured out the cause of the problem.