- #PARALLELS VS VMWARE VS VIRTUALBOX MAC OS#
- #PARALLELS VS VMWARE VS VIRTUALBOX INSTALL#
- #PARALLELS VS VMWARE VS VIRTUALBOX FULL#
VirtualBox has basic 3D support but would not run the 3DMark06 benchmark.
#PARALLELS VS VMWARE VS VIRTUALBOX FULL#
It’s a bit old at this point but it provides one of the best ways to test DirectX 9 performance, for which both Parallels and Fusion offer full support. If we focus just on the current versions of the virtualization software compared to Boot Camp, we can see that Parallels 8 holds a roughly 10 percent advantage over Fusion 5, while native Boot Camp tacks on about 21 percent higher performance over Parallels 8.įuturemark’s 3DMark06 is a DirectX 9 gaming benchmark that attempts to stress a system’s GPU and CPU the same way that a highly detailed game would. The free VirtualBox has a long way to go to match the performance of the commercial software applications and comes in a distant fifth place among virtualized options. As we demonstrated in our previous testing, Parallels 8 offers the best virtualization performance for this test, with Parallels 7 in second place and Fusion 4 and 5 nearly tied for third. Other than those tests, Boot Camp is the obvious and expected winner, although virtualized performance is not far behind in some categories. Normalized Boot Camp performance would still be better than virtualized performance, but not by as large of a margin. PCMark 7 does not allow a user to restrict the number of CPU cores, so the Boot Camp tests were able to use 8 logical cores while the virtualized tests were restricted to 4. This is due to the inability to have an "apples to apples" CPU comparison between virtual and native hardware, and to certain virtualization optimizations that can inflate synthetic benchmark scores.Īlso of note is the Boot Camp result for the Computation test. It should first be noted that some virtual benchmarks, such as the Lightweight and Productivity tests, report artificially high scores. These exceptions are noted for each test.įuturemark’s PCMark benchmark attempts to evaluate overall system performance, and includes tests for computational tasks, image and video playback and manipulation, web browsing, gaming, and storage speed. Not all tests were possible in all configurations. If any result was abnormal, we retested until we could determine the source of the abnormality and then discarded that result.
The configuration options don’t completely translate between applications, but each was set up to maximize the performance of the virtual machine over that of the host OS.įor the Boot Camp tests, all benchmarks when possible were set to use only four cores to provide a more accurate comparison.Įxcept where otherwise noted, each test was run three times in each configuration and the results, as long as they were within five percent of each other, were averaged.
#PARALLELS VS VMWARE VS VIRTUALBOX INSTALL#
We could not install Windows via Boot Camp on this drive, so native Windows was installed on the iMac’s internal 240 GB OWC SATA III SSD.Īll virtual machines were configured to use four of the iMac’s eight logical processors and 4 GB of RAM. We used Fusion 4.1.3, Fusion 5.0.1, Parallels 7, Parallels 8.797180 (we have to talk to Parallels about a simpler versioning scheme), and VirtualBox 4.2 to virtualize Windows 7 Professional 64-bit.Īll virtual machines were stored on and accessed from an external Pegasus R4 Thunderbolt RAID array with four 3 TB 7200 rpm hard drives in a RAID 5 configuration. Our tests were performed on a 2011 27-inch iMac at 3.4 GHz with 16 GB of RAM, running OS X 10.8.1. Read on for the ultimate performance comparison between Parallels 7, Parallels 8, Fusion 4, Fusion 5, Virtual Box, and Boot Camp. We’ve spent a few days testing and we now have our results. Readers were also curious about native Windows performance in Boot Camp. Many readers asked us to perform additional testing to determine the improvements between Parallels 7 and 8, and how the free VirtualBox software compared to the paid options. A head-to-head comparison showed that Parallels 8 beat Fusion 5 overall, although performance was very close in most benchmarks.
#PARALLELS VS VMWARE VS VIRTUALBOX MAC OS#
A few weeks ago, we provided a look at the major options for Windows virtualization on Mac OS X: Parallels Desktop 8 and VMware Fusion 5.
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