MacTech Magazine has taken a look at the two most popular virtualization products for the Mac. They did an in-depth benchmarking analysis of the most recent versions of Parallels Desktop 8, and VMWare Fusion 5.
MacTech Magazine, via 9to5Mac:
In the vast majority of our overall tests, Parallels Desktop 8 won. Again, if you count up the general tests (including the top 3D graphics scores), Parallels won 56% of the tests by 10% or more. If you include all the tests where Parallels was at least 5% faster, as well as the balance of the 3DMark06 graphics tests, Parallels increased the lead further.
MacTech benchmarked the two applications in a number of areas: Launching various OSes, application performance, 3D graphics tests, Retina Support, CPU test, footprint size, battery usage, file and network I/O, games, nd more.
Parallels Desktop 8 won on the majority of general tests and 62 percent of 3D graphics tests.
I myself have used VMWare Fusion for many years, and I am more than happy with version 5. I do however also have Parallels Desktop 8 installed, and do play with it from time to time.
How about you? What do you use for your virtualization needs? What’s your favorite? Let us know in the comments section below.
