performance of virtual machines under OSX

What what I've read, the virtualization software (ie VMWare Fusion & Parallels) seems much more advanced than their Windows counterparts (ie they can run 3d-accelerated games). However, how much of a performance hit should I expect to see from them? For instance, would a MBP (2.8ghz, 4GB memory, 128SSD) run Windows (under Parallels) as fast as a Dell (2.33ghz Merom, 2gb 667mhz ddr2; 100gb 7200rpm; 7400 Go Geforce)?

 

Read the sticky http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=145917.
There are some benchmarks there you can check out.

PS. the straight answer to your question would be: nowhere near.

 

yes,I think with new versions it will even perform better.

 

have to disagree cos it was updated more then 1 year ago

 

uhh, sorry xirurg. budding is right on the money on this one. windows performance in a virtual machine isn't even going to come close to native performance of recent hardware. this is true in both graphics and processor power. the 7400 would be several times faster.

 

Type 2 virtualization (like that of VMWare and Parallels) is always going to be slower than running a OS natively. Gaming on a VM is a waste of time.

 

so the performance decrease in virtualized windows is substantial? Great... Would I feel a noticeable lag running office apps (ie. outlook)?

 

office apps will run just fine. even things that are moderately processor intensive would be fine. but if you are comparing vm performance to native performance, any benchmark will show you that it is no contest.

 

For some reason, office applications even run significantly slower under VMware in a Vista host environment. It's nice to know that's not suppose to be the case under an OS X host.

Will Windows see the actual graphics card or some lame generic one with 8mb memory?

 

Windows will use the GPU on your Mac and will be able to use the amount of VRAM you have assigned to it in your VM settings. The main cause of the extremely poor performance is due to the bad (since it's difficult) implementation of the graphics engine in the VM.

 

For general use like Office, IE, WMP, etc. you won't notice much of a difference if using XP. I wouldn't recommend gaming or anything 3D intensive while running a virtual machine. I use Fusion mainly for Office 2007 apps. I like it much better than the Mac version. Excel, PP, or Word runs just like any other Mac app in Unity view.

 

If you're saying "I know for a fact that VMWare will run every single 3D game ever made for Windows at native speed" then you really need to read up. VMWare's 3D support is very basic, even in Fusion. They have support for "select" 3D games, and they keep a list, along with the known problems.

I run Virtualbox for Windows x64 and it runs my guests very well. It's also cross-platform, so I can run those VMs on Windows, Mac, and Linux hosts. Yay. The guys at Sun haven't said when they plan to support 3D, and don't seem to be in a rush, and it's no big deal, since virtualization isn't really for gaming.