Windows 7 on VirtualBox vs Boot Camp vs Fusion: benchmarks

[georgefreeman]

I recently ran the "Windows Experience" benchmark (accessible via Control Panel) for 32-bit Windows 7 on VirtualBox 3.2.8, Fusion 3.1.1, and Boot Camp 3.1.
I have a MacBook Air running OS X 10.6.4 with 2 GB RAM and 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU. I ran VirtualBox and Fusion guests on an external USB hard disc; Boot Camp on the internal SSD.
For VirtualBox and Fusion, I allocated 0.75 GB RAM to the Windows 7 guest and 1.25 GB RAM to the OS X host.

The results:

VirtualBox 3.2.8:
Processor 5.6
RAM 3.9
Graphics 1.0
Gaming Graphics 1.0
Primary Hard Disk 5.9

Fusion 3.1.1:
Processor 3.5
RAM 3.9
Graphics 3.0
Gaming Graphics 3.0
Primary Hard Disk 6.2

Boot Camp 3.1:
Processor 4.3
RAM 4.7
Graphics 3.5
Gaming Graphics 3.1
Primary Hard Disk 5.8

Note: VirtualBox graphics scores were the same both with and without the "experimental" 3D graphics guest addition enabled. 64-bit Windows 7 via Boot Camp gave the same scores as 32-bit except Processor improved from 4.3 to 4.6 and RAM improved from 4.7 to 4.8 . Puzzling that 32-bit Windows performed better via VirtualBox than 64-bit via Boot Camp.

Excecutive Summary: VirtualBox seems good, except for the graphics. Does this matter to anyone except gamers?

Has anyone else run similar tests?

George

[liriel]

I don't currently use VirtualBox, However, I found similar differences between Fusion 3.1.1 and Bootcamp using the Windows Experience Index. The general consensus in my reading about WEI is that it is not a reliable benchmark/indicator for real world performance. However, when I ran GeekBench the performance for single-thread processes was almost identical for Fusion and Bootcamp. Note that I was running Fusion on a single core which is why I am only comparing single thread processes. This is fine for me because the key apps I use in VM are not multi-threaded (e.g., ESRI ArcGIS).

My machine is a MacBook Pro i7 2.66GHZ, 8GB RAM. My fusion VM has 4GB of RAM and a single CPU core.

I can provide the Geekbench results if anyone is interested.

[Sasquatch]

It would be interesting if you include VB in the comparing benchmarks. It's of little use here to see benchmarks from competitors without our own product to compare it with.