Slowdown in Virtualization

[Noamyoungerm]

My late 2010 iMac currently has 12GB of RAM. Is this enough to remove any performance difference that may be caused by virtualization?

 

[BiggAW]

My late 2010 iMac currently has 12GB of RAM. Is this enough to remove any performance difference that may be caused by virtualization?

A) There's always a performance hit when virtualizing

B) Because you are now reading and writing to two different OS'es, if you don't have an SSD you're going to crawl to a halt because of disk I/O. With an SSD, there is little noticeable slowdown with 2-3 VM's open at the same time

 

[Noamyoungerm]

A) There's always a performance hit when virtualizing

B) Because you are now reading and writing to two different OS'es, if you don't have an SSD you're going to crawl to a halt because of disk I/O. With an SSD, there is little noticeable slowdown with 2-3 VM's open at the same time

True, but say I want to play something like battlefield 3, the system won't be writing to the disk very much, will it?

 

[BiggAW]

True, but say I want to play something like battlefield 3, the system won't be writing to the disk very much, will it?

Loading levels, with background processes still going on over on the Mac side. The whole virtual disk thing seems to slow down no matter what. With an SSD, VMs absolutely FLY. You'd be hard pressed to see a faster and more responsive system than XP running with 3GB of ram (recently increased from 1280MB for Solidworks) on an Quad i7 with a SATAII SSD with Sandforce. Once you break away from the seeking issue on the disk subsystem and put in a boatload of ram, VMs really work. Well.

EDIT: That, and gaming on VMs in general is a crapshoot. If you really want to game, I'd either have a separate system if you're really serious or if you're casual but want decent performance, install on Boot Camp.