2015 VM Benchmarks: Parallels 11 vs. Fusion 8 vs. VirtualBox 5

Geekbench

Our Parallels 11 vs. Fusion 8 benchmarks start with the popular cross-platform benchmarking tool, Geekbench. Available for virtually every modern computing platform — Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, and iOS — Geekbench aims to provide universally comparable scores of relative performance across multiple device types. It’s important to note, however, that Geekbench only tests a device’s CPU and memory performance, and doesn’t look at other important areas such as graphics or storage.

We ran the 64-bit benchmark test three times on each Windows installation using Geekbench 3.3.2, the latest version as of the date of publication. Geekbench reports two sets of results: one for single-core performance and one for multi-core performance. We’ll start with single-core results, below:

If you read our earlier benchmarks focused on Parallels 11 and Fusion 8 individually, you know that CPU performance is quite good, with both products able to offer near-native speed in the types of single-core tests run by Geekbench. With the race close, Fusion 8 pulls out a narrow victory in the CPU-bound tests by scoring between 1 and 2.5 percent higher than Parallels 11, although Parallels enjoys about a 3 percent advantage in the memory test.

Multi-core Geekbench results reveal a similar trend, with Fusion 8 narrowly winning in all categories. The most notable aspect of this test is how poorly optimized VirtualBox is for multi-core performance. Although configured with the same virtual resources as Parallels and Fusion, and able to post respectable numbers in the single-core test above, VirtualBox falls far behind when its vCPU is put to the test.

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