How fast is Parallels VM?

Discussion in 'Parallels Desktop for Mac' started by dhjdhj, Apr 11, 2006.

  1. dhjdhj

    dhjdhj Hunter

    Messages:
    220
    I'm just curious about this - I'm assuming that someone at Parallels has done some measurements to determine exactly how fast a VM session runs as compared to a native XP install (bootcamp or just plain PCs). Clearly for most (possibly all?) usual applications, the speed differential is not important but I'm intellectually curious.

    D
     
  2. My benchmarks showed a 3-5 times increase in speed over VPC 7 running on my 1.33 Ghz Quicksilver.

    CineBench Results Parallels Boot Camp
    Rendering (Single CPU) ]993 294
    Rendering (Multiple CPU) --- 535
    Multi-Processor Speedup 1.82
    C4D Shading 610 351
    Open GL SW-L 484 1422
    Open GL HW-L 356 2949
    Open GL Speedup 0.79 8.41

    (Sorry, I don't know how to do tables and the editor omits extra spaces.)
     
  3. mattham

    mattham Bit poster

    Messages:
    8
    Well - I shall try to give yo a bit of a guide (if I can)

    I use eon softwares Vue5 Esprit 3d rendering software. There is a default benchmark to run & it gives you a total time to render scene result at the end. So obviously lower times are better.

    Vue is very processor intensive & uses a lot of memory

    Computer - default mac mini core duo 1.66 512mb ram.

    Software :
    Parallels beta 2 (with virtualisation working) (ive only got 512mb ram so the virtual pc is only running on 200mb ram)
    Render time 17:03
    (note: running vue on win xp with 200mb ram is insane - i'm surprised it even worked.)

    BootCamp - windows XP - same macine same software
    Render time 8:41

    osx 10.4.6 same machine - osx PPC version of vue (same release as windows version)
    render time 28:43 (rosetta!!)

    As a reference
    p4 3ghz
    2gb ram
    windows xp
    render time 15:09

    Review: I'm very very impressed with the Native XP (boot camp) performance. and amazed that it even run in a VM with 200mb ram let alone return a half desent render time. PPC version running under rosetta - well that's to be expected.

    Hope this helps

    Matt :-D
     
  4. dhjdhj

    dhjdhj Hunter

    Messages:
    220
    Hmm, that doesn't really tell me anything as I don't know how much slower VPC is than a native machine. Much more relevent is the speed of Parallels VM compared to native Windows.
    D

     
  5. dhjdhj

    dhjdhj Hunter

    Messages:
    220
    Yes, this is very interesting.
    D


     
  6. aileron51

    aileron51 Bit poster

    Messages:
    2
    Some Java benchmarking

    I have done some testing with a very processor-intensive java process on both booting my MacBook Pro into Windows and using a Parallels VM. This process reads 20,000 records from a MySql database and then does some intensive calculations on the data. The process took almost exactly the same amount of time (19 minutes) in both environments. This process does not use graphics, so it seems to show native speed for parallels in processor-intensive activities.
     

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