Ability to increase the amount of VRAM

[remotecontroller]

Hello, I am trying out the demo version of Parallels Desktop Pro 19.2.0. I see the maximum amount of VRAM is 3GB only and it looks like it cannot be changed. If it can, please let us know. If not, can you please increase it to a larger amount for both Pro and non-Pro versions?

 

[alev]

Hi remotecontroller,

If we talk about Windows VMs, then they can use up to half of the memory assigned to them for Windows graphics purposes. By assigning more RAM to a Windows VM, you will be able to increase the VRAM.

Note that while a virtual machine does use the resources of the GPU, it does so indirectly. The virtual machine relies on the macOS graphics application programming interfaces, or APIs (Metal, OpenGL) but it doesn't have direct access to the graphics processing unit (GPU) or its memory. Windows OS video memory is allocated from Mac's RAM and acts more as a transitional buffer to pass the volumes of data between a virtual machine operating system APIs (Direct3D, OpenGL) and macOS APIs rather than actual storage. So, the amount of virtual graphics memory doesn't need to match physical GPU memory because the usage scenarios are different, and allocating more VRAM won't always have a positive performance effect.

Hope it helps.

 

[LeRoi]

I'm not familiar with the demo version but in the full version, you can do the following:
1. Shut down the Windows VM.
2. Open Parallels or right click the Parallels icon and select Control Center.
3. Control Center will display a list of VM's you have installed.
4. Right click on the VM you want to modify and select Configure. This will open the Configuration appl
5. Select Hardware in the Configure app and scroll to CPU & Memory.
6. You shoulld see Automatic selected. Change this to Manual and select the amount of memory you want to dedicate to the VM.
This is the process for the full version and I don't know if that will work for the demo version as I've never used that version.