Type of Article: MacTech Reviews

Games

One of the most frequent questions that we were asked over the past couple of years of virtualization benchmarks was "What about games?" The 3DMark06 testing did give us good insight and excellent consistently measured data, but we also wanted to try some games and see how they worked.

Footprint Tests

One of the most interesting things in the virtualization market is how little overhead virtualization takes today compared to what it used to. To assess this, we measured in a variety of ways. Specifically, we focused on CPU usage (overall for the Mac), which has an impact not only on usability but also, on laptops, how long the battery would last. CPU usage was measured using "top" (a command line tool that’s part of UNIX with a minimum of 50 continuous samples averaged for the result).

The Test Suite and Results

In the sections below, we’ll walk you through what we tested, and the results for each. These tests are designed to arm you with the information so you can make the best decision for your type of use.

For each set of results, you can see the analysis for each model of computer for XP, and for Windows 7. If you want to see more detail for single vs. multiple processors, or on an individual Mac model, you may want to review the spreadsheet for those details.

Issues Running 3D Graphics Under Virtualization

While we’ve been able to run previous versions of 3DMark06 on previous MacBook Pros and previous versions of Mac OS X, we were unable to successfully run 3DMark06 version 1.2 under VMware Fusion 3.0, 3.1.0, and 3.1.1 on the 2.53GHz MacBook Pro under Mac OS X 10.6.5. We really wanted to see the comparison, and tried more than one piece of hardware, reformatting hard drives, fresh virtual machines, etc., all with no success.  The test would typically hang the virtual machine and often corrupt the virtual machine.

3D Graphics Tests

We’re always on the lookout for new ways to measure graphics in particular. And this time, again, we did look at some of the results of other benchmark suites, and found that their assessment of graphics was so clearly wrong. For example, Performance Test 7.0 gave results showing 3D graphics at double the speed, when we could clearly see visually that 3D was closer to half the speed.