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VirtualPC 2004 vs. VMWare 4: Part II
by Hernán Di Pietro
In the first Virtual PC vs. VMWare article I wrote some days ago, VMWare seemed to be faster, sometimes much faster, than VirtualPC 2004 when using Windows98 SE as the guest operating system. I've received many comments about the "old" architecture of Windows 98, that is, being not very adequate to test both products performance. So I installed Windows XP on both VMs and benchmarked again. And what? I got some interesting results...
The test system hardware is the same:
- AMD XP 2600+ (1.92GHz), 333MHz FSB, 512k L2 cache (Barton)
- nForce2 Ultra400 Based board (Abit NF7-S 2.0)
- 1024 MB RAM, DDR 333MHz
- 40GB WD hard disk
- GeForce 4 MX, 64MB DDR AGP video card
- Windows XP, Service Pack 1
Passmark Performance Test 5.0
This is a very good synthetic benchmark that tests many aspects of a system performance: CPU, FPU, graphics, disk, 3D, etc. I simply loaded Passmark PT 5.0 in VPC2004 and VMWare, both in Win98SE and XP as guests. The first thing I noticed is that PT5.0 refused to run under VMWare/Win98SE combo. I got the following results.
We see that VPC 2004 with XP as guest performs much better than the VPC/W98SE combo. VPC, however does not reach the VMWare performance with XP as guest, but it comes pretty close. The only test where VPC couldn't deliver was in floating-point math. Here VMWare performs much better. But we've starting to see the improvement of VPC 2004 performance when a modern OS is used as it's guest.
Let's continue with the memory tests.
Altough the benchmark refused to run in VMWare+Win98SE, the above graph shows a nice speed improvement for VPC 2004 with XP as guest in comparison to VPC+W98SE. In fact, it's the fastest of all the VMs, coming close to the host system performance. VMWare is in the bottom of the pack in all the Performance Test 5.0 memory scores. A weird thing is the incredibly low "Allocate Small Block" score for VPC 2004+Win98SE -- this may result from a defect in the benchmark or some form of incompatibility of the benchmark running under VPC 2004+Win98SE.
Due to the findings at last article in low graphics performance of VPC2004+Win98SE, we've tested both 16-bit and 32-bit modes under WinXP for VPC 2004 -- 16bit is enough for developers and for many uses of virtual machines. As the Passmark 5.0 Gfx tests show, VPC graphics performance under Windows XP is not outstanding, but it's better when 16-bit color depth is used instead of 32-bit color. A very important thing that reverts the low-performance trend of VPC2004 is In the GUI test, which benchmarks how fast the graphics card/driver draws the Windows XP interface: the fast was VPC2004 with XP as guest, scoring 73.6 in 16-bit versus VPC2004+XP in 32-bit. VMWare+XP and VPC+Win98SE performed much slower: 49.6 and 45.6 respectively.
We can prematurely say that VPC 2004+XP is the fastest combo for applications involving GUI-only related graphics (such as development environments, so important for us :).
Let's see disk I/O performance with this benchmarking suite...
Surprise... VMWare scores, in average, the lowest disk performance with XP as a guest. VPC with WinXP performs admirably, as you can see. Ignore the fact that sometimes we are getting "faster" performance in the VM than in the host machine, this may be due to the conditions of executing the benchmark under VM.
WinBench 99
The Winbench 99 Suite, a very popular benchmark, offers very interesting results, even more interesting than the PT 5.0 test above. With WinXP as a guest, the VPC2004 performance is from very good to excellent. Disk I/O performance in VPC 2004 with WinXP is stellar. The low disk performance of VMWare+WinXP that the above test showed, this time is even more pronounced. VMWare seems to be very slow in disk operations with Windows XP.
In terms of graphics, the slow S3-Trio speed for Win98 graphics in VPC2004 are completely surpassed by the brillant VPC 2004 graphics performance with a XP guest, even getting almost equal to the native SVGA II driver speed of VMWare 4.0.5. See for yourself in the next overall result graph.
What I've said above is confirmed by the next detailed disk and GDI graphics results:
Conclusions
Well, now running Windows XP as guest on VMWare 4.0 and MS Virtual PC 2004 has modified which I thought about VMWare being generally faster. For my own purposes, the WinXP tests show me that VPC 2004 works extremely well in modern platforms such as Windows XP, where VMWare lacks performance, sometimes being severely slow (such as in disk I/O operations). A number may indicate that in some area VMWare is faster than VPC2004, but when you're using XP as a guest OS, Virtual PC feels much "smoother".
Tell me what you think at hernandp@speedy.com.ar and don't forget to discuss in this site forums!
