A lot of folks use Parallels to get Windows-only productivity software running on their Macs. However, the part we were looking forwards to was trying gaming via Steam.
Macs may be powerful, but their game support is not great compared with that of Windows. Steam installs as normal on Parallels. And the handful of games we tried loaded just fine. These were Amid Evil, the original Tomb Raider, A Story About My Uncle, and Project Cars. A random selection from across the years.
All but Tomb Raider had at least minor performance issues. But the less picky among us could play through all apart from Project Cars without wanting to chuck the MacBook out of a Window. Project Cars did not perform well at all.
Intermittent stutter was the recurring issue, which is likely down to a lack of RAM and video RAM. Both of these are limited in our test MacBook because, again, it only has 8GB, and Windows gets access to just half of that.
You’re likely to be able to achieve significantly better results with a 16GB Mac (or higher). However, we can’t help but be impressed by how well the virtualization here otherwise works. The one outright glitch we noticed was mis-displayed text in Tomb Raider’s menus.