Windows on Mac Performance, Parallels vs. VMWare vs. Boot Camp

Over the holiday, I played around with three Windows on Mac solutions mostly to find the best environment to run a multi-player game. But it lead me to benchmarking Parallels, VMWare and Apple’s Boot Camp. I decided a Windows on Mac performance showdown was in order. The results were surprising.

Parallels has been running on my Macbook Pro for a while. But I have been a little unhappy with its performance. I have had some frustrating pauses and general sluggishness. I had read that VMWare is a nice solution. Boot Camp always seemed like the best way to get performance and true compatibility for running Windows XP on a Macbook Pro. With Boot Camp, Mac OS X doesn’t even run. You boot directly to Windows.

Method

I found a copy of Boot Camp 1.4b, downloaded the latest VMWare beta v1.1, and tested with Parallels v2 and v3. I installed a fresh copy of Windows XP using each. Next, I stripped out all the junk that gets installed along with Windows, shut down unneeded Windows services, and installed some benchmarking software. I found Performance Test 6.1 by PassMark. It seems pretty decent and has a free trial. I configured each instance of Windows XP as similar as possible; same screen resolution, color depth, and memory. I didn’t have an option to reduce memory for Boot Camp so it had the full 3GB of RAM that is installed on my machine. I ran the benchmark three times on each instance and used the best result from each in the graph below.

Results

As you can see in the graph, Parallels is the winner. This was a big surprise to me. Given my experience with Parallels, I expected it to be the loser. I also expected Boot Camp to win because it doesn’t need to have Mac OS X running underneath it. I can’t explain why Boot Camp wouldn’t win in every category but it didn’t. Does anyone know?

Here are the results … higher numbers are better … click on it for a better view.

As you can see, Parallels v3 is a clear winner in almost every category. I triple checked the disk performance in Parallels 3 and found the result is correct. Parallels seems to do a very good job of caching for this particular benchmark.

Unfortunately, performance of 3D graphics is dismal in both Parallels 3 and Boot Camp. I can tell I won’t have a good experience with Call of Duty 4.

Wine in a box – some is bad.

I was very impressed by the Black Box Merlot.  The wine lasted about 4 weeks and was good.  It was a little tired of it by the end but it never spoiled.  Most bottles will spoil in three or four days.  My next experiment was with Stonehaven Shiraz and Trove Merlot.  The Stonehaven was pretty bad and the Trove was just OK.  Fortunately, most boxed wine is inexpensive so it is no big loss to pour them down the drain.

When will Apple sell OS X for PCs?

Any bets on when Apple will start shipping OS X for PCs to compete directly with Windows Vista for PCs? Microsoft sold 88 Million copies of Vista in three quarters this year. That is almost 30 Million per quarter. If Apple sold a third of that or 10 Million copies per quarter at $139 per copy, their potential market is an additional $4.1 Billion revenue per quarter. This doesn’t include the inevitable increase in demand for their other products. It also doesn’t include the potential negative of selling less hardware to people who just want OS X.

I bet they will do it.

Microsoft should be worried.