recently checked vbox 3.2.8 just to see performance in comparison, and I was pretty surprised to see vbox seems to have surpassed parallels, at least when running windows xp. applications feel significantly smoother and snappier, especially when (2d) graphics are involved, eg. scrolling, moving/switching windows, switching desktops using virtuawin etc. also compilation times in vs2008 are ~15-20% faster. verified this on 2 different mbps and 1 macpro with a fresh winxp install. as a parallels customer I'm a bit disappointed. if it wasn't for vbox lacking proper usb support in osx I would consider to switch. I already tried to change settings back and forth to get better results, disabling integration, amount of cpus, memory etc, no improvement. is there anything else I could try to make parallels perform better?
thanks for your enthusiastic feedback! parallels6 does the trick (enable vsync in video settings. help documentation is confusing/wrong, this settings also affects regular 2d applications) performance feels on par with vbox now.
I can't directly compare as I've only used VirtualBox with XP and Parallels with Vista and W7, but VB felt very sluggish at times, even with the tools installed. Felt like whatever priority was given to the VM was bouncing all over the place making the responsiveness both faster and slower. Could be a configuration error. Unrelated to Windows, I much prefer Linux under Parallels. I have used both w/ various distros, and Parallels wins speed/responsiveness handsdown.
I do agree, tried ubuntu and 3d desktops like compiz run extremly well on parallels5 already. My problem was just with 2d, in fact compiz 3d ran much smoother than xp 2d. But as said with parallels6 it's all good.
