Boot Camp vs Parallels vs VMware Fusion Benchmarks

[Manatee]

I've used both Parallels and Fusion since their first Betas, and I've found the performance of both to be very good. I used to use Virtual PC on my G4 machines, so I'm pleased as long as the VM runs at the same quantum level as bare metal -- which both Parallels and Fusion do.

My main concern -- far more important to me than speed -- is the integrity of the virtual machine and its interface with the host OS. That's the sort of comparison that I'm really interested in between Parallels and Fusion.

I've found the current versions of both VM products very stable, and very flexible. I've been using Vista for several months, and it has worked well with both Parallels and Fusion. I miss the Aero, though. I find much of the Vista interface overly complex and unintuitive. Just try finding where to click to shut down Vista.

 

[Hemingray]

Wow, I never would have expected that... Parallels has always seemed to be the slowpoke to me. When I beta tested VMWare Fusion, it seemed a lot faster! Parallels just seems to keep eating up the CPU.

(P.S. Using XP, mind you.)

 

[RedTomato]

Strange tests, incomprehensible graphs, and garbled explanations

Thanks to Mac Tech for putting a lot of effort into this, but the article seems to be summarised as:


Strange tests, incomprehensible graphs, and garbled explanations.

Strange tests

Open a message in outlook, save a document, vertical scroll in Excel etc, are these things really worth benchmarking?

Incomprehensible graphs

Take a look at the first graph:

There's a section titled 'Open Messages'. Are the relevant graph bars below or above the section title? It isn't clear. Looking at 'Print email' at the end, it seems the bars are set above the legend, which means bizarrely you have to read from right to left to understand the graph.

But looking at the left end of the chart, does that section show 'launch times' or an average of all the measurements? If not, why is no average shown? And who's Adam?

Furthermore, due to their presentation, it's hard to extract any useful information from the graphs.

Because the bars float about in some sort of x,y,z swimming pool, detached from their scales, it's hard to tell if, for example, the last yellow bar on the right in the above graph is higher or lower than the red bar behind it. Ditto for many of the bars on the other graphs.

Looking at most of the red bars, I have no idea where on the scale they are. Truly shocking. I feel like I'm looking at one of these examples of how NOT to make a graph.

Garbled explanations

This and the corresponding strange maths has already been pointed out several times in this thread. I won't beat the dead horse.

 

[Di9it8]

I have found VMWare completely reliable running on a MacBook Pro, compared to the constantly crashing pc that is virtualised.
No speed issues whatsoever, and switching between Mac an PC is no problem.
I would really recommend VMWare Fusion

 

[chillywilly]

Anyhow, those of you running Fusion and say it's so much faster than Parallels, how much RAM are you allocating it? My WinXP/Fusion is kinda slow (MacBook current version w/2GB RAM, fresh install of everything). I have allocated 512MB to Fusion.

I'm running 2gb on my MBP and I've given Fusion 768mb. If I'm doing a lot, I'll increase it to 1gb.

If I end up using it more often, I may have to upgrade to a new MBP and upgrade the RAM to 4gb, so I can allocate at least 1.5gb to Fusion.

But so far, the 768mb works for most stuff I do.

 

[Towhead]

FWIW, Ive installed PSoC designer under fusion on my macbook and without any issues it started working with the usb debugger/programmer automatically. Niiice.

Have not tried Parallels, and after reading all the other testimony here why should I, eh?

 

[APPLENEWBIE]

Anyhow, those of you running Fusion and say it's so much faster than Parallels, how much RAM are you allocating it? My WinXP/Fusion is kinda slow (MacBook current version w/2GB RAM, fresh install of everything). I have allocated 512MB to Fusion.

On iMac with VMware Fusion, about 700mb of ram allocated out of 2.5gb. On Parallels about 1000mb of ram allocated out of 2.5gb.

 

[ks-man]

I'll be soon buying a mac (longtime PC user) and had a couple of questions that seem to apply to this thread.

My wife and I have been planning on getting a laptop (probably MBP after a hopeful Macworld update) b/c I wasn't yet ready to retire the PC desktop (I use a desktop more than a laptop). I figured getting a Mac laptop would be a nice transition to using a mac and assuming that I can do everything I need to on my mac, getting an iMac in a few years (could get a MP but I do like the look of the iMac).

After reading this thread I'm wondering if Virtualization should lead us towards getting an iMac now. I like the idea of bootcamp but I still do enough on my PC that I don't want to have to restart the computer whenever I want to use Windows.

My main question is if people here can give me some real world examples or explanations on what I would notice comparing:

A 2 year old Dell running XP with 1GB of Ram and I think a 1.5GHZ processor vs. an entry level MBP with 2 GB of Ram vs. an iMac with 2GB of Ram.

How would these 3 computers stack up head to head running Boot Camp on the macs and how would they stack up running one of these two programs (probably Fusion) on the mac?

Thanks for the help.

 

[GNice]

Like many (most?) I have some real questions about this test. My firsthand experience is that VMWare is more stable and less resource intensive. Hmmmmmm.....

 

[mgclayton]

The summary misquotes the article.

"In XP, Parallels is 17% faster than VMWare Fusion on XP and 1% faster than Boot Camp."

Wait... faster than Boot Camp?

Parallels was 1% faster than the Baseline PC, and NOT Boot Camp.
Boot Camp was 12% faster than the baseline PC, and therefore the fastest as you'd expect.
Hope that clears that up.

(Sorry, new to this, don't know how to quote things correctly)

 

[BornAgainMac]

I've used parallels v2 and 3 and found it so slow that it was unusable.

Boot camp is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay faster than parallels

Probably because of memory. Remember with Boot camp you are using all the available memory on your Mac. Running Parallels or VMWare you are allocating memory for your guest operating system. If you allocate too little then it will run slow. If you allocate too much then both your Mac will run slow and your guest OS.

I wouldn't run Parallels on a Mac with less than 2 GB of total memory and less than 1 GB for XP or Vista.

 

[cgc]

I'm really curious if they used more than one CPU/core with Fusion or BootCamp. I find it IMPOSSIBLE that Parallels is faster then BootCamp...I would be suspicious if either virtualization were even close.

BTW, I've tried Parallels 3 and own Fusion 1.1 and use BootCamp, all good but in order of speed (I've done my own unbiased benchmarks) is: Bootcamp, Fusion, Parallels with Parallels coming in last place.

 

[twoodcc]

nice to know this stuff. so if you want vista, get fusion, and if you want xp, get parallels

 

[ppcaric]

First of all: BootCamp is not a virtualization way of running windows. It runs windows natively on your mac. It only introduces a bios emulation needed at boot time, but afterwards it's 100% native windows. So... HOW can parallels be faster than BC?!

Besides... I currently run the latest versions of vmware on a macbook pro with core2duo cpu and, believe me, vmware is by far faster than parallels! The only thing at which parallels works better is at win-mac integration. I'm not only talking about coherence/unity mode, but also about data exchange between the two OSes. As for this aspect, parallels is much better, also giving you the chance to see windows data as mounted network positions or as mounted image files of the windows hard drive when the virtual machine is shut down.

Last but not least: vmware is much better and faster at virtualization for linux OSes. But this wasn't in the aim of the benchmark, so let's keep it out.

Conclusions? Parallels guys must have paid these guys for publishing such a biased and false benchmark!

 

[arn]

Parallels was 1% faster than the Baseline PC, and NOT Boot Camp.
Boot Camp was 12% faster than the baseline PC, and therefore the fastest as you'd expect.
Hope that clears that up.

The summary is correct. Directly from the article:

When testing the one step tests described above, on average, Parallels is 17% faster than VMware Fusion when running Windows XP, and 1% faster than Boot Camp.

Later in the article

And, as we said before, if you want the best XP performance with the types of applications tested here, Parallels is not only faster than VMware Fusion, but it's faster than Boot Camp on average for the applications that we tested.

 

[sundoggy]

What rock have you been hiding under, and from which planet?

Let's see what these posters are saying when virtual machines and boot camp kill off OS X and Apple becomes a high end Windows OEM. This coming year will make the path clear. Intuit has already dumped Quicken for the Mac. They say they're working on a Mac version for 2008 but those in the know say it will be a browser based, online version. Adobe will be next. Heck Photoshop Elements 6 is out for Windows for goodness sakes. The Mac version is 4. Just wait until the first big developer announces that Mac users will run the new version under bootcamp or virtualization. The rest will soon follow. Apple itself is worried about it and said so in recent guidance releases.

You are seriously deranged, or at least ignorant and out of touch. Have you seen the Mac market share numbers lately? They are soaring up. Granted they're no where near Windows, but then we know that the masses (you included) are ignorant.

 

[WildPalms]

Yeah i noticed that...it doesn't make sense.

Thats because thats one of worst test setups I've seen. Useless data.

 

[mgclayton]

The summary is correct. Directly from the article:



Later in the article

Ah yes, I see you got that from the Overview, but the article contradicts itself in the main section:

"By comparison, when we compared XP configurations against the baseline PC, we got these results:

* XP under Boot Camp averaged 12% faster than the baseline PC running XP

* XP under VMware Fusion averaged 1% faster than the baseline PC running XP

* XP under Parallels averaged 19% faster than the baseline PC running XP"

 

[pamon]

I use parallels and am very impressed with it. Run Win XP Pro on it and have been very satisfied in the speed and ease of use for parallels. Downloaded VM trial and never could get it going right.

 

[dante@sisna.com]

I run VMWare

I run Fusion and it runs fast and great.

Have Win 2000 and Vista on it now. XP is coming Friday.

Very stable and fast. Setup was easy and flawless.

All features work, even my MacBook Pro's wireless keyboard and mouse.

 

[ppcaric]

Ah yes, I see you got that from the Overview, but the article contradicts itself in the main section:

"By comparison, when we compared XP configurations against the baseline PC, we got these results:

* XP under Boot Camp averaged 12% faster than the baseline PC running XP

* XP under VMware Fusion averaged 1% faster than the baseline PC running XP

* XP under Parallels averaged 19% faster than the baseline PC running XP"

This is no contradiction! It says, in order of speed, Parallels is 19% faster than the reference PC, BootCamp is 12% faster than the ref. PC (hence slower than Parallels), VMWare is only 1% faster (so the worst).

That said, it's self-evident that something must be wrong with the benchmark procedure they used. Native speed XP (BootCamp) CANNOT BE slower than the same XP on the same machine sharing memory and CPU power with MacOS X running (Parallels and VMWare)!!!
This article is pure trash (even without entering the newest Parallels vs oldest VMWare issue).

 

[aswitcher]

Just got Vista today for VMWare so pretty happy to see this.

 

[solvs]

nice to know this stuff. so if you want vista, get fusion, and if you want xp, get parallels

I wouldn't say that. My experience has been exactly the opposite with XP (haven't tried Vista). Read the rest of the thread, and you'll see I'm not alone when I say that. We use Parallels at work and it sucks. Not as bad as it was in the beginning, but I still don't like it. I've been using VMWare myself since before it came out, and while not perfect, is much better IMO. Especially when run from my BC partition.

For the record, I know some of the people who have worked on it, so I'm not exactly unbiased, but I still call bunk on these tests.

 

[jhande]

Parallels has a malicious feature called SmartSelect. It is apparently "ON" by default, or at least I didn't specifically enable it when I brought some Parallels 2.x VM images into Leopard with a fresh Parallels 3.0 install.

The result was that OS X was now registered three times to open a bunch of windows file types- one time for each of my three VMs. You can turn this feature off, but in my case I was left having to repair OS X after the damage was done. I had to do some manual cleanup including rebuilding my launch database.

Seriously! SmartSelect is definitely *not* a feature, it's a nasty pernicious piece of bleep. I've been through the same route, and it pisses me off to no end that I've paid for it.

What really escalated this to incandescent rage, was that there were no forums listed on parallels homepage (I think they *still* don't have a direct link there). I only found them when googling for the SS problem.

Parallels as a kit is OK, but suffers from extreme featuritis. Result: over the holidays I'm buying Fusion. I've been running the trial, and it's been rock solid.

.02 etc.

 

[iSamurai]

i get bluescreens every time i use vmware, it's probably winxp's fault, so for now i'm using parallels until vista sp1 is out then i can do a clean install.