Parallels 5 vs Fusion 3.01

Thema Allgemein | Karl Geiger | 12/12/2009 | 11:28

When VMWare released the Fusion 3.01 update on December 10, claiming an up to 80% speed increase of the virtualized graphics over version 3.0, I decided to test it against Parallels 5.

 

Both virtualizers support Windows 7 and Aero, and both virtualizers claim that you can run Windows games on them.

 

I’m running a late 2008 MacBook Air, 2 Gig ram, Nvidia 9400 shared-memory graphics card (which leaves me with 1.75 Gig to for applications, OS, etc).

 

I normally use Parallels 5, the VM is running in Full Screen, SmartMouse is off, and I am using a Realtek AC’97 sound driver as the AMD sound driver delivered by Parallels really sucks. The VM has 768 Mb of memory and runs Windows 7. I assigned it 1 core.

 

To run Fusion, I de-installed all Parallels components and imported the Parallels virtual machine into Fusion. Once that was complete, I de-installed the Parallels tools on that machine and installed the VMWare tools. I ran the VM in Full Screen, optimized the mouse for games, set the machine not to check for upgrades. The VM has 1,024 MB of memory and runs Windows 7. I assigned it 1 core.

 

First impressions:

The display in the Fusion VM kept flickering, I got many odd visual artefacts especially after system boot, the desktop kept redrawing. This got better once I disabled the Fusion tools service (but that left me without copy and paste between OSs). Parallels’ display, while also showing an occasional black bar, is somewhat more stable.

Both VMs hog an incredible amount of wired memory (about 1.45 Gigs of wired memory for the VM), but switching between Mac and Windows is faster and smoother with Fusion. All regular Windows apps (Office, Live Writer etc) run as expected.

Sometimes Fusion seems to be waiting for data to load from the disk; once it has all of them, it plays “catching up” – animations sometimes speed up dramatically for a second or so before reverting to regular speeds.

 

Windows Experience Index

  Parallels: 2.9 (based on the Aero Score) – Processor 3.8, RAM 3.9, Aero 2.9, Graphics (Games) 3.6, HD 4.5

  Fusion: 3.1 (based on the Aero Score)  - Processor 3.7, RAM 4.5, Aero 4.1, Graphics (Games) 3.4, HD 4.7

 

Games:

I have a bunch of somewhat older games that I bought to try out on Parallels – my VM is somewhat weak and slow, and old games are to be had at bargain prices. Every single one of them is working in Parallels; of the three games I tested in Fusion only Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War ran as expected. Icewind Dale (a very old Black Isle title) couldn’t do OpenGL in Fusion, and running it without OpenGL forced Windows to turn off Aero. In Parallels, it runs just fine, including OpenGL. Star Wars: Republic Commando runs quite well in Parallels (only turning on Team Shadows crashes the game), while it doesn’t run at all in Fusion (it crashes past the loading screen).

 

My conclusion: I removed Fusion from my Mac and will stick with Parallels. Maybe in a year or so…?

 

(Und det habick nu allet uff Englisch jeschriehm weil Guhgl det sonst ja mal ja nich lesen kann. N bischen Ess Ieh Oh mussick ja ooch mal betreihm.)



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