Archive for the ‘Fusion’ Category

Parallels 8

Saturday, September 22nd, 2012

For occasional convenience, I use Parallels 6.  Now I am considering upgrading to 8.

  • http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/parallels_unleashes_desktop_8_a_major_upgrade/
    • The many enhancements in Desktop 8, including Windows 8 support, are aimed at making the integration between these two OSes even more seamless.
    • Improved speed. Parallels claims that Desktop 8 performance is up to 30 percent faster for input/output operations, 30 percent faster for games and up to 25 percent faster for virtual machine operations such as boot, suspend, shutdown and resume, when compared to Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac. The Mac Observer will be publishing a full review of Desktop 8, including benchmarks, in the near future.
  • http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/parallels-desktop-8-vs-vmware-fusion-5-benchmark-showdown
    • OpenGL performance was good for all configurations, although Parallels performed about 20 percent better in the Windows 7 tests.
    • Windows 8 on Parallels made up for its inability to run the OpenGL test by scoring the highest on the single- and multi-core rendering tests. Parallels overall scored higher than Fusion, but by less than five percent.
    • The pattern of Parallels holding a slight, but consistent lead over Fusion continues with Geekbench. However, as was mentioned above, both applications have reached near-native processing performance, and virtual performance in all categories is less than five percent off of native Geekbench results on OS X.
    • Windows 8 has a significant advantage over Windows 7 in boot times, and Windows 8 via Parallels recorded an amazingly fast 9 second boot. Loading Windows 8 on Fusion took about five seconds longer, and Windows 7 on Fusion took the longest time, 22 seconds.
    • From Comments:
      • There are things much more important than speed. VMware Fusion works great collecting data on lab machines connected via USB, using Windows on Mac. Parallels Desktop fails all the time: crashes, unexpected Windows reboots, etc, losing precious and expensive experiments, hard work and time. A real nightmare!
        • {But data collection doesn’t sound too stressful, and as always, what was their configuration (especially RAM) and what version of Parallels were they using?  I am specifically interested in Parallels 8.}