For as long as I’ve been using OSX I’ve been running XP under VMware Fusion for those can’t-do-without programs, but now that I have my shiny new Macbook with 4GB of RAM I wanted to see whether it’d be possible to run Vista – and preferably Vista 64-bit.
I’m going to be doing a lot of Windows development over the next few months (WHS, Silverlight, ASP.NET) and would much prefer Vista so on Friday I spent some time doing a few benchmarks with both XP 32-bit and Vista 64-bit.
(Originally I also planned to test the 32-bit version of Vista, but I couldn’t face an additional two hours of installs and service packs. Plus I decided to do Vista 64-bit after XP incase of any problems).
Note that this is very rough testing using three averaged runs of GeekBench. The OSX timings are included to measure the impact of running the VM, not to draw any comparisons between OSX / Windows performance. I don’t know how Geekbench compares across platforms.
Details:
- System: 2008 Macbook, 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB Ram, 7200RPM Drive
- VM: VMware Fusion 2.0, one VCore, 1.5GB Ram, running from bootcamp partition
- OSX: 10.5.5
- Windows: Windows XP Pro 32-bit SP3, Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit SP1
- Benchmark: GeekBench 2.0.19 for OSX and Windows (32-bit)
OSX Performance:
| OSX without VM | OSX hosting Windowed VM | OS hosting Unity VM | |
| XP 32-bit | 3115 | 3072 | 3083 |
| Vista 64-bit | 3115 | 3043 | 3067 |
VM Performance
| Native | Fullscreen VM | Unity FM | |
| XP 32-bit | 2765 | 1924 | 1932 |
| Vista 64-bit | 2596 | 1886 | 1892 |
Note: The native times are running Windows via bootcamp which gives windows two cores with 3.5GB of ram under XP and 3.7GB under Vista 64 (~256MB are reserved for integrated graphics). Since the VM has one core and 1.5GB of ram I don’t expect the times to be close, I’m just interested in the performance differences between XP and Vista in each situation.
So what’s interesting about the results?
- The difference between XP and Vista-64 are approx 2% in both Fullscreen mode and Unity, whereas natively the difference is approx 6%.
- The difference in impact upon the host OS (OSX) appears to be even lower.
- Despite what I’d always assumed, Unity mode appears to be both faster than fullscreen and with a lower impact on the host. I guess it’s faster to skip the background than it is to separately overlay the windows.
So it looks like I’ll be sticking with Vista 64-bit for a while, or at least until I encounter some must-need program that has 64-bit issues which I’d pessimistically give a 50/50 chance.
And just to reiterate that this is extremely rough testing and many of these figures could be complete rubbish. It’d also have been interesting to test XP / Vista when both were under more load.
2008/11/03, 15:24
nice, this comparison was exactly what i’m looking at doing since my xp bootcamp running through fusion 2 is starting to die. same hardware, same idea
have you tried the optimization tips that vmware have published?
http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2008/09/optimizing-vist.html
2008/11/03, 15:52
I’ve done 2,4,6.
I had planned to get a little more aggressive with disabling unused services, but the performance is good enough that I haven’t been compelled to yet. I might look at the battery suggestion though, I have noticed that battery life seems to take a bit of a hit when Fusion.
2008/11/29, 12:08
I’m coming to the conclusion that trying to run 64-bit Vista under VMware (in any mode) is something you want to do only occasionally. It’s just too painfully slow, whether it’s booting, running or shutting down. If you want to get some real work done with Vista, you need to actually boot Vista.
Especially annoying is the lack of support for Aero under VMware, even full-screen. Booting Vista directly, the hardware is plenty fast and Aero runs beautifully. But VMware doesn’t support the transparency and shading hardware features in its virtual machine.
2008/11/29, 12:10
I should add that if you do want to run Vista under VMware, you should at least adjust the settings. By default, VMware only gives Vista one processor and 1GB of memory. Upping that to 2 processors and 2GB did make a big difference, but still not enough to make me enjoy the experience.
2008/12/01, 18:08
Nicole,
Lack of aero-support is indeed unfortunate but one of those virtual machine things. I don’t miss it that much, but probably will in Win7 with the more Aero-based effects.
I run my VM with 1.5-2GB of Ram and 1 virtual CPU and find the performance more than adequate. This may be because I’ve upgraded my HDD to a 7200RPM model so paging is less noticeable. Hard drive speed is one of those specs that’s less often talked about but can make a big difference.