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Revisiting Virtualization on the Mac - Fusion vs. Parallels

By Vincent Chang - 29 Mar 2009

Performance

Performance

There are various ways of gauging the performance of the two virtualization products, from its memory/CPU footprint, the responsiveness of the interface to abstract benchmarks numbers. In our case, we have gone with a mix of the two, with accounts of our user experiences spliced with benchmark numbers. To get the more bland part of this section over with first, let's see how the two software fared in 3DMark06 and PCMark05.

To briefly reiterate our test system, it was the latest 17-inch MacBook Pro (2.66GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB memory, GeForce 9600M GT) with Fusion 2.0.2 and Parallels 4.0 Build 3810 installed. Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 was used as the virtual machine (VM) for the testing and each virtualization software had a copy of this operating system (OS) as a VM. For the virtual machine settings, we set both software to use two virtual processors with 1GB of memory. 3D was enabled along with support for drivers and USB. A hard drive partition of 40GB was set aside for each VM.

Nothing but the Numbers

Despite repeated trials, we couldn't get an overall PCMark05 score for Parallels since it failed to complete the memory section. We did manage to get the other subsystem breakdown and here, Parallels scored higher than Fusion for the CPU. However, Fusion did better in graphics and in the hard disk section too. Both software generally performed significantly worse than the Boot Camp partition running Windows natively.

Moving onto 3DMark06, just from looking at the scores, one would think that Fusion was the clear winner. Yes, the numbers favored Fusion heavily but while these were accurate, they did not tell the full story which was that in Fusion, several artifacts were noted during the benchmarking. They were not serious enough to derail its performance but visually, they were ugly and obvious. Also, there remained a huge discrepancy between the VM's performance and Boot Camp that pointed to more work needed for both companies when it comes to their graphics support/drivers. Both VM software still support only up to DirectX 9.0 standard and not the DirectX 9.0c that supports the modern gaming requirements with Shader Model 3.0 support.

Subjective Experience

For this section, we decided to run some applications while in full screen mode (Windows Vista). But before that, we tested the time taken for both virtualization software to suspend and resume the virtual machine, since we felt that users would likely be doing this quite often when using VMs. The following results were timed using a stopwatch.

Parallels had a slight edge when resuming a VM from its last saved state for the first time i.e. after a cold boot. However, Fusion took less time to suspend the VM and subsequent resumes too were also faster with Fusion. Overall, both software were snappy enough that we had no complaints about the time taken to resume or suspend a VM.

As for normal usage like running office applications, both software responded promptly enough that it may even fool users into thinking that they were running Vista natively. CPU utilization was low for both, though the memory footprint could obviously be quite large, given that we had allocated 1GB of memory for the guest OS.

Next, we moved onto trying high definition videos while in the guest OS. The media player chosen was Windows Media Classic Home Cinema while we used a 1080p movie trailer as the test subject. Both Fusion and Parallels were able to play the video at an acceptable level, though there were occasions when both software had laggy moments. Fusion in particular recorded high CPU utilization of up to 100% at certain parts of the video and we encountered occasions where the audio lagged behind the video. Parallels meanwhile only showed up to 60% CPU utilization and generally had fewer issues with audio sync.

For this section, we'll have to give it to Parallels for its lower CPU utilization. Given that Parallels 4 claims to have implemented support for Intel SSE4, that could have helped for the media playback, or it could be that the graphics drivers on Parallels fared better.

Gaming Experience

Finally, we took the plunge into gaming proper, since both virtualization products were advertising their DirectX 9.0 support, with Parallels going a step further by having OpenGL 2.0 compatibility. We however weren't too optimistic after the 3DMark06 performance. Hence, we have chosen a less demanding DirectX 9 title, Sins of the Solar Empire, a real time strategy game that should not be too stressful for both software.

Installation went by flawlessly for both and we tried the game at 1024 x 768 with no anti-aliasing (there was no choice to select that anyway). There was however lag felt when we started the game, especially when panning across large expanses of the game; it's a real time strategy game after all. Using Fraps, we noted that the frame rates were very playable for both Fusion and Parallels, with at least 30 frames per second (FPS). Generally, Fusion gave higher peak FPS figures, which can go as high as 70 while Parallels peaked at the 50 FPS range. We didn't notice any artifacts, which is good news.

We did encounter some slight issues when changing the game resolution though. Fusion may occasionally get into an endless loop of flickering when we tried to change the in-game resolution. It does allow the game to stretch and fill the screen, even at 1024 x 768, which meant the icons and textures ended up looking blurry if you do so. Parallels however would not do this and will run the game exactly at 1024 x 768 resolution, with the rest of the unused space as a black border. Both virtualization products allowed the game to run at the MacBook's native resolution of 1920 x 1200 and surprisingly, it was quite smooth and playable.

While there's still no substitute to Boot Camp for real gaming needs at the moment or the rare Macintosh port, both software have certainly made significant strides in this area.

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