How do Boot Camp, Parallels Desktop, and VMware Fusion stack up?

MacTech – How do Boot Camp, Parallels Desktop, and VMware Fusion stack up?

This article from MacTech magazine provides comprehensive benchmarks on the various ways a person with an Intel Mac can run Windows on their machine:

Boot Camp, VMware Fusion and Parallels are all very good, each in their own way. You should make your decisions based on what your needs are as a result.

If you don’t want Mac integration, and just want to run Windows, go with Boot Camp. It’s faster than a PC anyway.

If you want a virtualization product (that allows you to run Windows alongside Mac OS X), and you want the best performance for the types of things that we tested, then clearly you need to run XP and not Vista. Furthermore, in our tests, both VMware Fusion and Parallels performed well, and were a good user experience. That said, Parallels was somewhat faster in general than VMware Fusion for XP.

If you want the best virtualization performance for Vista, then VMware Fusion is your choice. And, if you want to keep your Mac OS X and Windows environments completely separate, VMware Fusion’s design may be your better choice. (And, although we didn’t test it, we would expect VMware Fusion to have better multi-processor support if you really have an application that is designed to take advantage of it.) If your goal is tight integration between one or more Windows applications and Mac OS X, Parallels is the clear winner when running either XP or Vista. And, as we said before, if you want the best XP performance with the types of applications tested here, Parallels is not only faster than VMware Fusion, but it’s faster than Boot Camp on average for the applications that we tested.

Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac is available at a price of $72.