Up to 20% faster Windows resume and shutdown.Up to 100% faster Microsoft Office application startup.This means that when running Big Sur in a virtual machine under Parallels on a macOS Big Sur host, you have support for 3D features in apps such as Apple Maps, Pages, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere and more. The effort paid off, with Parallels claiming a world first for support for 3D apps using Apple's Metal graphics acceleration engine. That was so Parallels could take advantage of all MacOS Big Sur's revamped features, plus add more than 30 new features. The big changes in the latest MacOS Big Sur meant putting in the equivalent of more than 25-man-years of engineer programming time deep 'under the hood' at the kernel level.
This time around, it was a huge rewrite for the Parallels engineers. Parallels gets updated every year to keep pace with Apple's major OS upgrades. You can download Windows and various Linux distros from within Parallels and run them at the same time on your Mac.