I just upgraded to VMWare Fusion 3 and am happy to say that everything is working fine. I actually just wanted to drop a note about some of my first impressions regarding Windows and DirectX 9 performance.
I just gave it a spin on my unibody Macbook Pro with a Windows XP bootcamp partition. First of all, the start-up time is drastically improved. It booted up faster than if it were actually running in Boot Camp and when Windows loaded, it was pretty much ready to go. That's big over VMWare 2 where I would usually have to just walk away from it for 5 minutes before it had fully loaded Windows.
After it updated the VMWare Tools and drivers, I wanted to see if gaming was a reasonable expectation with the new DirectX 9 support. In VMWare 2, even old and simple 3d games, like Deus Ex, had pretty bad performance issues, making them unplayable. I set the guest OS to utilize 1 core and 1.5GB of RAM out of my Core2Duo and 4GB of RAM on my host machine. Then I started up TF2. It took it quite a while to load, but it's kinda slow to start up normally, so I just let it do its thing. I ran it at 1024x768 with pretty much everything turned down, then I jumped into a private game. Graphically, it looked perfect, or as perfect as you could expect at low graphics settings. Performance-wise, it was... well... not ideal. I could get decent framerates, but it was punctuated by stutters and hitches pretty frequently. I'd say it's like playing on a decent computer, but with a 400 ping. Barely tolerable if you have a high threshold for slow game performance. I then jumped into a game with 15 players and got slaughtered. So, really not the best for online gaming.
However, I would say that mediocre performance is a huge improvement over no game performance at all and it would probably run perfectly well with older games or single player titles. To test this, I've started up Vampire: Bloodlines, which is an older Half-Life 2 engine game. One interesting thing to note is that the Virtual Machine is capable of rendering at settings higher than what the monitor should be able to support, as it defaulted to 1600x1200 while the monitor's native resolution is 1440x900. The effect of which was that it filled the screen, but everything seemed scaled down in size. I set the game to run at 1280x1024 instead, with most of the graphics settings at their default values, all the way up. Loading into the hub world, the game still has a few hitches, but is much closer to playable and, amazingly, looks just as flawless as it does in Windows. When in smaller areas, the framerate is just about perfect and runs fine even when switching windows to type in Firefox or using Expose.
So, overall, I'm very happy with the update and very impressed with how quickly virtualization technology is advancing. I more frequently use VMWare to test websites I'm working on in different versions of IE, and I've found that even there it's substantially faster just in switching between windows and launching browsers. But to be able to pop into Windows for a quick favorite game during coffee breaks is really a nice treat.
