
Parallels Desktop 8 vs. VMware Fusion 5: Benchmark Showdown - tanousjm
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/parallels-desktop-8-vs-vmware-fusion-5-benchmark-showdown
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ksec
"Consumers may not be happy with the yearly paid update cycles,"

That is one of the complain i heard most about.

"But the fierce competition between Parallels and Fusion has led the market to
a mature and capable state and consumers of both products will likely be
satisfied with their performance."

I think there is so much truth in it. Without bunch of consumers playing every
year, there will be no incentive to make gaming performance and other
improvement. This is likely the first time in history Virtualisation has
catered Gaming market. And their performance are now, more then enough for
most of our usage.

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tanousjm
Hi guys, thanks for the feedback. We didn't have access to a copy of Parallels
7 for an 8 vs 7 comparison, but we're working on getting one and will update
the article when we do.

We're also planning to run tests in native Boot Camp, and we're going to take
a look at the free VirtualBox to see if it's worth even paying for these apps
at all.

Thanks again, and let me know if you have any other specific benchmarks or
apps/games that you'd like us to test. We'll do our best to try everything.

~~~
bdreadz
Looking forward to the update with things running on a bootcamp partition.
This is the way I have it running currently on a couple machines. I've yet to
update those to 10.8 as I was waiting for this type of test to start surfacing
before making my choice.

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jmount
Stopped using both Parallels and VMWare Fusion a while ago. Paid for both- but
both of them screwed up too many associations in OSX (Parallels being the
worst of the two). They would cause some Microsoft Word documents to open in
the emulator (even though I had a current copy of Word in OSX). When I want
emulation I want isolation: so I use Virtual Box which I consider better as it
has fewer host operating system hooks.

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joethompson
You can tell Parallels to never cross-associate OS X or Windows programs with
each other via the configuration preferences (<http://goput.it/s5h.png>). I
can't speak for Fusion but I would be surprised if they didn't have a similar
setting.

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spicyj
Yup, Fusion has the same setting:
[https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.hipchat.com/6574/26709/ff8q...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.hipchat.com/6574/26709/ff8qwx4fqr0lr43/upload.png)

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rvid
I'm curious about how virtual box compares to either of these.

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avens19
Or Hyper V

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daniellockard
HyperV doesn't really count here...

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Derbasti
The only downside to Fusion is that it is usually a bit buggy right after the
release. But they are also extremely quick to fix those bugs shortly
thereafter. Also, I am extremely impressed with their support.

(How does that compare to Parallels?)

I am looking forward to the forthcoming comparison on arstechnica, though.
They usually give the respective GUIs a rundown, too, which I think is more
interesting than performance. Also, I would like to see VirtualBox included in
those comparisons.

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tanousjm
In a variety of benchmarks, Parallels 8 beat Fusion 5 by five to twenty
percent. But both were remarkably capable of running Windows 7 and Windows 8.

Heck, even Crysis was "playable" on Medium settings.

Any other tests you want to see? Let me know!

~~~
Flow
I don't think even twice as fast performance will convince me to buy another
Parallels upgrade when they treat their customers like this:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/x0qgs/using_parallels_h...](http://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/x0qgs/using_parallels_hate_the_popup_advertising_heres/)

Every time I started Parallels I got a huge window asking me to register in
order to get software updates. And when I did I got ads instead. :-(

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duskwuff
Agreed -- with the constant promotional popups on launch, running Parallels
starts feeling like you're using an ad-supported product. Except you still
have to pay for it!

And no, there's no way to completely turn them off. Each _individual_ promo
popup has a checkbox that'll make it stop showing up, but that's useless,
because they run so many promos. Even the super-secret "defaults write"
command that Parallels support hands out only works until you next update
Parallels.

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darrenkopp
While I don't own Parallels 8 or Fusion 5, I will say that I picked Fusion 4
for one reason: It automatically detects my network connection on the host and
uses that as the network connection for my VM. It made my life so much easier
when I use wired network at work, and wireless network at home.

At the time, Parallels did not have this feature so I would have to go edit
the settings of the VM and change the network adapter. I do not know if
Parallels has this feature now or if they have added it to the old version
since I tried it.

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weaksauce
It does. It's the default adapter setting.

I personally like the flexibility of parallels in this regard as I use
parallels for dev work and need specific network settings to be remembered.
Though, there was a spell in which after a while parallels would kill my
wireless connection and there would be no internet on my Mac even though I
didn't have a network adapter configured to be used on the virtual machine
side. Thankfully they fixed this as it was extremely annoying.

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zemaj
I used to use Fusion on my mid-2010 MacBook Pro and found it pretty much
unusable as it was so slow. However I recently installed Parallels on my
Rentina MacBook and I've been amazed at the difference. It can run 3 different
OSs at once on top of OsX with barely a performance hit. It makes debugging in
IE finally practical. Probably the single biggest benefit for me for upgrading
my MacBook.

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bsg75
Does Fusion have a convenience advantage when also using VMWare Workstation or
other server products, with the ability to move the same VMs between
platforms?

