VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop Benchmark Comparison

Question

This is a quickie benchmark of VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop using Super PI, PC Mark 05, and Passmark.
VMWare Fusion 36932
Parallels Desktop 3094 Beta 2
Notes:
Both virtual machines were allocated with large 10+ GB virtual disks and 640MB of RAM. The VMWare CPU was configured with two processors. The Parallels CPU was configured with 1 (two is not available). VMWare reported the CPU as 1 physical, 2 logical processors running at 2.66 GHz while Parallels reported 1 physical, 1 logical processor running at 9.6 GHz (the combined speed of all four cores on the Mac Pro). The max observed CPU utilization in activity monitor when running under VMWare was 200% and max under Parallels was 173%.
I chose not to compare 1 VMWare CPU vs. 1 Parallels CPU. While Parallels does not support SMP or multithreaded processes on multiple processors the CPU utilization on the Mac went well above 1 core (173%). For this comparison, I wanted to see results of max processing based on what the two vendors have delivered, as opposed to benchmarking the underlying "virtual or hypervisor cpu" on a 1:1 basis. This explains why VMWare was 2x faster than Parallels on some CPU tests.
Both of these products are beta. VMWare is running in debug mode (can not be turned off in this beta).
Caveat emptor on these stats. This was an unscientific exercise to satisfy my curiosity. Some of the extraordinary differences are highlighted with <--.
Platform:
Mac Pro 2.66 GHz, 2GB RAM, Nvidia 7300GT
Disk 1 - OS X, 73GB Raptor
Disk 2 - dedicated disk where each virtual machine image was created separate from the OS or any OS-related virtual memory files.
VMWare and Parallels guest OS: Windows XP Professional, SP 2
Comparison Benchmrk
VMWare Fusion 36932 and Parallels Desktop 3094 Beta 2
Super PI Parallels VMWare
512K 8s 9s
1M 20s 21s
4M 1m 57s 2m 03s
PC Mark 05 Parallels VMWare
CPU Test Suite N/A N/A
Memory Test Suite N/A N/A
Graphics Test Suite N/A N/A
HDD Test Suite N/A N/A
HDD - XP Startup 5.0 MB/s 19.54 MB/s <--
Physics and 3D Test failed Test failed
Transparent Windows Test failed 69.99 Windows/s
3D - Pixel Shader Test failed Test failed
Web Page Rendering 3.58 Pages/s 2.34 Pages/s
File Decrypt 71.73 MB/s 67.05 MB/s
Graphics Memory - 64 Lines 179.92 FPS 111.73 FPS
HDD - General Usage 4.82 MB/s 42.01 MB/s <--
Multithread Test 1 / Audio Comp N/A N/A
Multithread Test 1 / Video Encoding Test failed Test failed
Multithread Test 2 / Text Edit 152.85 Pages/s 138.48 Pages/s
Multithread Test 2 / Image DeComp 5.91 MPixels/s 35.4 MPixels/s <--
Multithread Test 3 / File Comp 3.22 MB/s 6.03 MB/s
Multithread Test 3 / File Encrypt 19.0 MB/s 33.26 MB/s <--
Multithread Test 3 / HDD - Virus Scan 27.91 MB/s 25.49 MB/s
Multithread Test 3 / Mem Lat - Rnd 16MB 5.34 MAcc/s 6.63 MAcc/s
File Comp N/A N/A
File DeComp N/A N/A
File Encrypt N/A N/A
File Decrypt N/A N/A
Image DeComp N/A N/A
Audio Comp N/A N/A
Multithread Test 1 / File Comp N/A N/A
Multithread Test 1 / File Encrypt N/A N/A
Multithread Test 2 / File DeComp N/A N/A
Multithread Test 2 / File Decrypt N/A N/A
Multithread Test 2 / Audio DeComp N/A N/A
Multithread Test 2 / Image DeComp N/A N/A
Memory Read - 16 MB N/A N/A
Memory Read - 8 MB N/A N/A
Memory Read - 192 kB N/A N/A
Memory Read - 4 kB N/A N/A
Memory Write - 16 MB N/A N/A
Memory Write - 8 MB N/A N/A
Memory Write - 192 kB N/A N/A
Memory Write - 4 kB N/A N/A
Memory Copy - 16 MB N/A N/A
Memory Copy - 8 MB N/A N/A
Memory Copy - 192 kB N/A N/A
Memory Copy - 4 kB N/A N/A
Memory Lat - Rnd 16 MB N/A N/A
Memory Lat - Rnd 8 MB N/A N/A
Memory Lat - Rnd 192 kB N/A N/A
Memory Lat - Rnd 4 kB N/A N/A
Transparent Windows N/A N/A
Graphics Memory - 64 Lines N/A N/A
Graphics Memory - 128 Lines N/A N/A
WMV Video Playback N/A N/A
3D - Fill Rate Multi Texturing N/A N/A
3D - Polygon Throughput Multiple Lights N/A N/A
3D - Pixel Shader N/A N/A
3D - Vertex Shader N/A N/A
HDD - XP Startup N/A N/A
HDD - Application Loading N/A N/A
HDD - General Usage N/A N/A
HDD - Virus Scan N/A N/A
HDD - File Write N/A N/A
Processor Intel Core 2 9653 MHz Processor Unknown 2661 MHz
Physical / Logical CPUs "1 Physical, 1 Logical" "1 Physical, 2 Logical"
MultiCore 1 Processor Core Multicore 2 Processor Cores
HyperThreading N/A N/A
Graphics Card Generic VGA Generic VGA
Graphics Driver Parallels Video Driver VMWare SVGA II
Co-operative adapters No No
DirectX Version 9.0c 9.0c
System Memory 640 MB 640MB
Motherboard Manufacturer N/A Intel Corporation
Motherboard Model N/A 440BX Desktop Reference Platform
Operating System Microsoft Windows XP Microsoft Windows XP
Passmark Parallels VMWare
CPU - Integer Math (MOPS) 112.35 230.31 <--
CPU - Floating Point Math (MOPS) 280.46 588.33 <--
CPU - Find Prime Numbers (OPS) 446.37 676.99 <--
CPU - SSE/3DNow! (MMPS) 2118.56 4737.13 <--
CPU - Comp (KB/s) 2994.16 5952.34 <--
CPU - Encrypt (MB/s) 18.09 36.27 <--
CPU - Image Rotation (IRPS) 598.21 1184.41 <--
CPU - String Sorting (TPS) 2118.81 3672.59 <--
Graphics 2D - Lines (TPS) 220.71 25.15 <--
Graphics 2D - Rectangles (TPS) 189.74 61.8 <--
Graphics 2D - Shapes (TPS) 39.54 13.71 <--
Graphics 2D - Fonts and Text (OPS) 190.39 75.88 <--
Graphics 2D - GUI (OPS) 439.77 63.72 <--
Memory - Allocate Small Block (MB/s) 2533.83 2526.21
Memory - Read Cached (MB/s) 1960.5 1906.27
Memory - Read Uncached (MB/s) 1871.79 1826.08
Memory - Write (MB/s) 1687.81 1545.43
Memory - Large RAM (OPS) 60.99 46.37
Disk - Sequential Read (MB/s) 102.11 76.45 <--
Disk - Sequential Write (MB/s) 58.33 50.9
Disk - Rnd Seek + RW (MB/s) 51.4 40.4
CPU Mark 711.08 1432.72 <--
2D Graphics Mark 743.31 176.5 <--
Memory Mark 599.94 580.38
Disk Mark 766.11 606.7
PassMark Rating 557.27 637.35<br>

Answer 1

Thanks for posting these numbers - it's an interesting comparison.
I would expect the final VMWare fusion performance numbers to be quite a bit better than that of Parallels - they have almost a decade's worth of experience more than the Parallels folks in this arena, and a much larger development team to boot.
Once VMWare Fusion is released to the public, I think that you'll see a clearer distinction between the two products. VMWare will continue to appeal to the professional customer, with a more robust feature set and corporate-friendly features (and a correspondingly higher price tag); Parallels will fall more into the consumer/VirtualPC-replacement market. It will be interesting to see how Parallels will be affected when (and if) VMWare player is ported to OS X.
Interesting about the Parallels performance stats on a native partition - looks like almost enough reason to avoid the bootcamp partition approach altogether. Sharing a native windows installation with a VM in parallels is a pretty scary situation in any case, as the two environments have entirely different hardware configurations. Do-able, but there is some black magic involved (if you want to see an example of what I mean, try to move a windows installation from one machine to another w/different hardware sometime - it ain't pretty); I wouldn't try this in a production scheme unless I had REALLY good backups.