Parallels 3.0 is finally out and besides offering support for native Windows applications directly in Mac OSX, it also provides better 3D support, which should please gamers with a Mac.

The new Parallels 3.0 will provide support for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics, 'snapshot' backup and recovery of virtual machines, and a new suite of security settings that help secure both Windows VMs and OS X from cross-platform corruption and contamination.

This will allow for games like Half Life and Quake to be run natively under Mac OSX- but only for Intel-powered Macs. Up to now, Parallels hasn’t supported 3D graphics acceleration, which has made it unsuitable for gaming. New in this release is 3D support for OpenGL and DirectX graphics software, which enables users to run Windows games from inside Parallels without having to reboot.

Most of today’s portable devices like MP3 players, BlackBerries or cameras can now be used with their original drivers inside Mac OSX, thanks to Parallels’ virtualization technology. The goodies don’t stop here: on the same machine, users can simultaneously run Windows, Linux and OSX applications, without worrying about rebooting.

Parallels Transporter also facilitates the easy transport of the entire Windows system on a Mac.

"With SmartSelect, I set Word for Windows to be my default application to work with .doc, .rtf and .txt files, so when I double-click a file with that extension in either OS- even if it is an e-mail attachment in Apple Mail -- the file instantly opens the file in Word [in Windows]," said Ben Rudolph, Parallels' director of communications.