VMware Fusion 8 Benchmarks vs. Fusion 7 and Boot Camp

3DMark06

3DMark06 is an aging benchmark that developer Futuremark warns may no longer be reliable for testing modern hardware. Considering the technical limitations of our virtual machines, however, it’s one of the few remaining industry standards that is compatible with all versions of Fusion and Parallels.

Like its modern successor on the previous page, 3DMark06 tests both raw graphics power in addition to combined graphics and CPU capabilities. In the chart below, “Overall” is the combined score best used for comparative purposes, “SM2.0” indicates the graphics-heavy Shader Model 2.0 tests, HDR/SM3.0 is a combined graphics and CPU test, and “CPU” is the CPU-bound result.

Fusion 8’s CPU performance improvements, illustrated by our earlier Geekbench tests, are apparent in the 3DMark06 benchmark, with the latest version of VMware’s virtualization software scoring about 12 percent higher than Fusion 7 in that category.

Other than that result, however, Fusion 8 does indeed score higher than Fusion 7, but only by a negligible margin, suggesting that VMware’s engineers may have reached the limit of what they can offer in terms of this older DirectX 9 implementation.

Table of Contents

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1. Introduction
2. Fusion 8 New Features & Overview
3. Hardware, Software, and Testing Methodology
4. Geekbench
5. 3DMark (2013)
6. 3DMark06
7. FurMark OpenGL Benchmark
8. Cinebench R15
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9. PCMark 8
10. Passmark PerformanceTest 8.0
11. x264 Encoding
12. x265 Encoding
13. File Transfers
14. Virtual Machine Management
15. Conclusions
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