VMWare on Thursday announced the general availability of the VMware Fusion 13 product line: Fusion 13 Pro and Fusion 13 Player, for both Intel as well as the latest Apple Silicon Macs.
After years of ongoing development and several Tech Previews, we’re ready to bring Windows 11 and more to both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs with the latest major version of VMware Fusion.
On both Intel and Apple Silicon, Fusion 13 brings support for Windows 11 virtual machines. In order to achieve support for Windows 11 System Requirements while still providing performant virtual machines, we had to innovate. We’ve delivered a new Virtual Trusted Platform Module (2.0) device that is recognized as a valid TPM, and new encryption method to support that TPM.
On Intel Macs you’ll notice full support for Windows 11 with VMware Tools allowing for host-guest interactions like Drag & Drop, or Copy & Paste, as well as shared folders and USB and Camera device passthrough.
On Apple Silicon, we’ve introduced our first round of features for Windows 11 on Arm. In this release VMware Tools provides virtual graphics and networking, and more is still to come. With certified and signed drivers Windows 11 looks fantastic, and adjust the resolution to 4K and beyond!
Note that Fusion on Apple Silicon must run the Arm variant of Windows 11, and it does not support the x86/Intel version of Windows.
However, for users who want to run more traditional win32 and x64 apps, Windows 11 on Arm has built-in emulation to run those applications compiled for Intel/AMD, and as a user-level process our testing has shown us that this works ‘out of the box’.
For Graphics, Fusion 13 sports OpenGL 4.3 in Windows and Linux VMs on Intel, and in Linux VMs on Apple Silicon.
On Intel, Windows continues to enjoy DirectX 11 graphics, and Fusion continues to support eGPU devices for incredible performance using some of the fastest GPU’s available.
On Apple Silicon, Fusion can deliver OpenGL 4.3 with blazing fast 3D hardware acceleration to arm-based Linux virtual machines with Linux kernel 5.19 or greater.
MacDailyNews Note: VMWare is continuing to offer free “personal use” licenses for Fusion Player, and have updated the license delivery tool to provide v13 keys. If you have a v12 key, you can register for a new v13 key here: vmware.com/go/get-fusionplayer-key
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The announcement might be a little premature. You can download the software after some searching around and cookie traps. (the direct link leads nowhere.) Then the validation link in the app itself leads a blank screen.