Parallels Crashing After Update 22... and Fix

[TheBlackSpectre]

I'm not really sure where to post this, but here is my best guess. Parallels is a virtual machine that allows Mac users, like myself, to run Windows and in turn run Windows applications like Warframe. I've been playing Warframe for over 4 years like this, and it's been fine... until Update 22. Since then I've been experiencing huge amounts of lag every time a graphical element loads, and with certain types of graphics even hard crashes that crash both the game and Windows. I understand that Digital Extremes does not officially support playing the game on a Mac, however I'm fairly certain I am not the only Mac user playing Warframe, and I have found a temporary fix that might help others.

The symptoms are lots of lag that make the game utterly unplayable, and in certain predictable circumstances the game crashes Windows. I've been able to reproduce the crash consistently and without fail whenever Octavia activates her #3 power. Bam! Down Windows goes!  After much poking around, troubleshooting, driver installing, bricking my Mac, reinstalling the OS more than once, etc., I've discovered that the culprit lies in the way the game now processes DirectX 10 and the old way that Parallels handled it. The fix is to DISABLE (or unselect) DirectX 10 in the game launcher settings. 

Once you've done that, there will be far, far less lag and the crashes will stop. Now, there will still be more lag than we had before Update 22, but if you have a powerful Mac, it should be at least workable with low graphics settings in the game. I've also noticed that selecting or unselecting GPU Acceleration in the game launcher settings doesn't seem to have any effect either way, which might indicate other graphics issues.   

I hope this helps any other Mac players that run into this same problem. I also hope that the Devs will read this and, if not support playing the game on MacOS, at least lend a little help to the good people at Parallels to make the game play as well as possible within the virtual machine for those of us on Macs.

Cheers!