  We present benchmarks of the parity transformation for the Quantum
Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA). We analyse the gate resources
required to implement a single QAOA cycle for real-world scenarios. In
particular, we consider random spin models with higher order terms, as well as
the problems of predicting financial crashes and finding the ground states of
electronic structure Hamiltonians. For the spin models studied our findings
imply a significant advantage of the parity mapping compared to the standard
gate model. In combination with full parallelizability of gates this has the
potential to boost the race for demonstrating quantum advantage.
