How can I run Windows 11 on MacBook Pro M4

Per Microsoft: “Windows 11 runs best on a PC designed for Windows. When such an option isn't available, here are two different ways to use Windows with Mac.” This from the official support info:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/options-for-using-windows-11-with-mac-computers-with-apple-m1-m2-and-m3-chips-cd15fd62-9b34-4b78-b0bc-121baa3c568c

Whether Microsoft and your preferred virtual machine vendor are both supporting M4 yet, you’ll want to ask them.

Another potential option is to host Microsoft Windows somewhere (such as Azure), and access that.

You can't run regular Intel versions of Windows on an Apple Silicon Mac. Apple Silicon processors speak a different machine language than Intel and AMD ones. Thus you need to run Windows 11 for ARM. That version can run some off-the-shelf Intel applications using Intel emulation, but there are limitations, and there is overhead.

In addition, neither Apple nor Microsoft support installing Windows for ARM as a dual-boot OS on a Mac. You must run it inside an ARM virtual machine created by a program like Parallels Desktop.

So if you are running Intel applications, you will have the overhead of running them using Intel emulation/translation inside of a copy of Windows that itself is subject to the overhead of running within a virtual machine.

Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion Pro appear to support DirectX 11 – but not the current version of DirectX, DirectX 12 Ultimate. Parallels Desktop supports OpenGL 4.1; VMware Fusion Pro supports "emulated" OpenGL 4.2.

Parallels Desktop – Games

Parallels – Limitations of running Windows 11 on Apple silicon Mac computers in Parallels Desktop for Mac

VMware (by Broadcom) – VMware Desktop Hypervisor

The UTM site says

"Can I run games?

No, probably not. UTM does not currently support GPU emulation/virtualization on Windows and therefore lacks support for 3D acceleration (e.g. OpenGL and DirectX). You may be able to run older games with software rendering options, but nothing with hardware acceleration."

diethelm289 wrote:

Boot Camp doesn't work anymore.

You will have to use a virtual machine.

You will need a virtualization solution such as Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion and an ARM version of Windows 11.

Regards.

To be fair though, the performance of the M-series and their RAM speed and SOC integration offset a lot of that overhead.

Thank you very much much. Your answer is what I need, man. So VM is not an issue anymore and I can play Windows games smoothly on the arm-based Mac M4 machine, right?

hard to say, rule of thumb is that virtual machines does not usually support much hardware 3d features compared to running on the pure "metal" so to speak

and plus then if the windows games you would be running are intel x86 based games then the windows 11 for arm CPU would need to translate the x86 code to arm instructions

so there are 2 things working against high performance 3d windows games on your m4 mac