VMware Fusion 5 and Parallels Desktop 8 are both desktop virtualization platforms that allow to run Windows applications on Mac and both have been released recently, yesterday CNET published an article comparing the two products.
According to CNET both programs are able to launch rapidly the guest operating systems and the access to Windows program without difficulty.
Apparently the test revealed the slight better performance difference in Parallels Desktop 8, overall WMware Fusion shows similar experience running a virtual machine, beside the processes of comparing the efficacy of the processes could change when running under different hardware and also under different software environments, therefore the results might be differents depending on the environments.
The MacObserver gives us more details about the testing which were performed on a iMac running OS X 10.8.1 evaluating the capacity to run the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 Professional and Windows 8 Pro.
How it was evaluated? Configuring the virtual applications to use the half of the iMac logical processors and 4 GB of RAM, with plenty of space ensured to elimitate possible bottlenecks, testing all the performances three times and implementing DirectX 10 on both of the applications, to make it possible to test in both DirectX9 and 10 configurations.
The performance testing was released with:
Futuremark’s PCMark used to evaluate overall system performance, and includes tests for computational tasks, image and video playback and manipulation, web browsing, gaming, and storage speed.Cinebench which is a multi-platform benchmarking utility based on Maxon’s Cinema 4D rendering softwareFuturemark’s 3DMark06 a DirectX 9 gaming benchmark that attempts to stress a system’s GPU and CPU the same way that a highly detailed game would.Geekbench, a multi-platform tool for measuring a system’s computational and memory performance.
Furthermore boot time was analysed to check how virtualization applications can handle cold booting.
According to MacObserver, the competence between the two products lead to deliver on the market two satisfying solutions even if Parallels resulted to be fastest in most of the performances trials.