VMware Communities
Tangible
Contributor
Contributor
‎11-26-2009 11:24 AM

Performance of Fusion vs. Bootcamp?

I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate under VMWare Fusion version 3.0 on an iMac (Snow Leopard; 2.93Ghz Core 2 Duo; 4GM memory). This particular machine very rarely needs to run as a Mac. Would I get signifanctly better performance as a PC under Bootcamp instead of Fusion?

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4 Replies
actx
Contributor
Contributor
‎11-26-2009 12:54 PM

Yes, it will be much faster. Depending on what you are doing it it could be much, much faster.

I use Fusion every day but there are a few apps that I still run in Bootcamp because they are just too slow. Additionally, graphics will be better supported and/or faster.

Tangible
Contributor
Contributor
‎11-26-2009 05:31 PM

Thanks. That being the case, is there any way I can use the Windows system I've built under Fusion in Bootcamp, or do I need to start from scratch? (I know it works the other way, i.e. Fusion can use a Bootcamp partition.)

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cgguy
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎11-27-2009 11:51 PM

There probably is, backup/restore/reactivate is one option. But my feeling is that it wil be just as easy or easier to start over in terms of raw hours spent.

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GatorTPK
Contributor
Contributor
‎01-12-2011 01:43 AM

I am running Windows 7 x64 Ultimate under VMWare Fusion, and I got a lowest User "Index" of 6 (because of simulated video).  When I booted up natively with BootCamp the performance "Index" dropped to 5.9 because of the Memory speed.  This was very surprising.  I am running a 27" iMac Quad Core i7 2.8GHz with 16 GB of RAM.  VMWare would only allow 8 GB to be allocated.  The only reason I got a rating of 6 under Fusion was because of the simulated 256MB Video Card.  I have a Radeon HD 4850 with 512 MB.  The Memory rating was 7.4 or 7.5 and the HD speed was 7.9.  Natively everything was slower except for the Video performance.  (Windows 7 used 3GB in addition to the 512MB VRAM for Video RAM, very odd beast Windows 7 is).  Also Windows 7 used 16 GB of my HD for every 16GB of RAM I had.  That was very annoying. 

I found that Windows 7 ran faster under Fusion possibly because the UNIX drivers are faster than the Windows Drivers?  I am also running a newer version of Fusion 3.  (As of December 2010)  This may also have affected the performance increase over bootcamp compared to running Fusion 3.0 from 2009.

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