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Parallels Desktop 6: The Ars Review



Since the Parallels Desktop 6 update is all about speed and gaming improvements, this review is mostly a slew of 3D and gaming tests. The increasingly viable VirtualBox virtualization app isn't benchmarked, because it's not well-suited to gaming and high-end 3D.

First, we'll cover the basics: I/O and shared folder benchmarks.

The copy and boot time improvements are looking good, but the suspend and resume speed took a big hit. I'm not sure what happened there, but these times are averages so it's consistent. The documentation for version 6 claims "Reduced time for resuming paused and suspended virtual machines on Macs with powerful configurations," and I'm using of the most powerful configs you can get. VMWare Fusion 3.1.1 is also pretty consistent in that it's never the best but never the worst in these tests.

CPU benchmarks

Because of the past problems I've seen with synthetic benchmarks in virtual machines, I'm restricting my CPU tests to real-world application tests that were timed by hand. I tried to mix it up to involve disk I/O for the Nuke test. All VM configs were the same, with the same RAM allotment and 8-core CPU.

There were no surprises this time: Parallels Desktop 6 is clearly faster than version 5, and it bested VMWare Fusion 3 in all tests.

3D professional app OpenGL/DirectX tests

Maya OpenGL playback of 800,000-polygon icicles scene:

The benchmark is a timed playback of a flyby. All units are in seconds. The results:

Yes, you're seeing that right. Not what I'd call a close race to the finish. I checked that both apps were using the same settings and had "play every frame" on, but it seems that VMWare is just that slow for demanding GL applications. I went on to do some more subjective tests with Topogun (OpenGL) and Autodesk 3DS Max in DirectX mode. I loaded up a 3-million polygon model in Topogun 64-bit and drew some quad patches on the reference mesh: ?

It was pretty clear after a couple minutes in each app that the differences I saw in Maya are consistent across other GL apps. Parallels rotated the model with ease, and was performing at near-native speed. VMWare... not so much. It was more consistent and stable than when I reviewed it last, but the speed was not nearly as good as in Parallels Desktop 6 or even 5. 3DS Max was a similar story, but told through DirectX. If you're looking to use CATIA, Solidworks, or other hefty OpenGL CAD apps in a virtual machine, Parallels is still the best way to do it.

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