VMware Fusion 3.0

[Ben Cohen]

For those of you wondering how ArchiCAD runs under Fusion 3.0, the news is good, very good. I have had patchy performance from Fusion 2.0, some times just selecting a folder can take 20 - 30 secs, often requiring a restart of the virtual machine. But this issue has disappeared

I am running a Macbook Pro @ 2.5 GHz with 4 gig of ram and Snow Leopard.

1. The installation was a breeze, my virtual machine (which was created from my old HP laptop) remained completely intact, and the Mac didnt even need to be restarted. Although windows did once I booted and updated Vmware.

2. Startup seems slightly quicker.

3. ArchiCAD 12 and 13 are both running really well. Fusion now supports OpenGL 2.1 and the 3d window is very responsive. Surprisingly 2d redraw is noticeably faster. Panning and zooming are now instant. The virtual machine with XP is now running ArchiCAD as well as a cheap PC box.

4. VBE is now working under Fusion. Previously VBE would not even start. It will now run, albeit slowly and there seams to be a few material mapping problems. But as this is 3.0 I would expect this to get better.

So all round performance has improved, with Fusion minimizing, pausing and generally running much quicker. At the upgrade price of US $39 its well worth it. 3.0 has made bootcamp redundant - for me at least. Now all I need is for Apple to release a Core i7 laptop!

[Anonymous]

Virtualbox suppots poorly both OpenGL and Direct3D technologies... So this is not suitable for AC.

[Anonymous]

I have used both and my experience is that Parallels is typically faster and Fusion more stable. Parallels once corrupted my Bootcamp partition so I have been very cautious about using it since. Both have improved considerably since I last did side by side comparisons so I can't be sure my experience still applies, and I haven't upgraded to the latest Parallels yet either.

[Ben Cohen]

FYI the recent update to 3.01 has help with the VM Performance degradation I previously posted about. It seems to be back to normal
I have Parallels 2.0 on my Mac Pro 8 core and it's performance has been great (currently not working since I upgraded to snow leopard). Some testing in v12 showed ArchiCAD to actually performed better in Parallels than in bootcamp with native windows. I then got a Mac laptop and the performance was not good, so I gave VM Fusion a try and at the time it seemed to be a bit faster.
I would love to see some comparisons of the latest VM and latest Parallels running ArchiCAD on the same machine.... but who would be running both?

[Anonymous]

Ben wrote:
I would love to see some comparisons of the latest VM and latest Parallels running ArchiCAD on the same machine.... but who would be running both?

I would be delighted to do it but am feeling a bit cash strapped by the holidays etc. and am putting off the Parallels upgrade for now.

I had a similar experience when I tested about a year ago with some things running faster in Parallels than in Boot Camp (and Fusion). At the time Boot Camp on the new Mac Pros was benchmarking better than the comparable Dell so this seemed no small achievement.