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VirtualPC 2004 vs. VMWare 4 Performance Review
by Hernán Di Pietro
This is the first article I write and it's a simple performance comparison between two well-known "virtualization" software packages, both commercial: Virtual PC 2004 and VM Ware Workstation 4.0. Both virtual machines were configured with a 1024x768x32 desktop resolution, WIndows 98 SE and 256 MB RAM.
The test system hardware is as follows:
- 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
SiSoft Sandra 2004 Standard
In this first test, VMWare 4.0 offers the best performance altough VPC 2004 is very close on all tests, excepting the memory bandwidth tests: in floating-point memory test, VPC 2004 only achieves 891 MB/s, while VMWare gets a very respectable 2089MB/s -- in fact, very close to the host 1.92GHz system which obtained a mark of 2217 MB/s.
Host XP 2600+
VPC 2004
VMWare 4.0
MIPS
7231
6700
6791
MFLOPS
2990
2722
2809
Integer SSE
17724
15954
16341
Float SSE
17916
16627
16689
Disk
20316
16639
17518
Mem Int Buffered
2345
1308
2272
Mem Float Buffered
2217
891
2089
WinBench 99
The Winbench 99 Suite, a very popular benchmark, offers interesting results. This time, VMWare was faster than VirtualPC and it even scored the same High-End disk performance as the Host XP system. This leads to think of VMWare 4.0 as a highly optimized piece of software.
Results here are strange... In many tests, the virtual machines perform better than the host Windows XP system. This was checked three times. This may indicate 1) Winbench does not measure accurate performance under VMs 2) those tests (applications) perform better on WIndows 98SE than on the host WInXP system. If this is true, then we can, for example, use Premiere 4.2 in VPC or VMWare and obtain better performance than in the host XP OS. Altough, this seems pretty weird. Contact me if you've some hints on this.
The graphics tests show the host system performing much better than the virtual machines. VirtualPC, which emulates an old S3 Trio chip, is much slower than VMWare with it's own optimized SVGA driver, but even VMware can't compete with the speed of the host graphics subsystem. It's clear that VPC and VMware cannot handle graphical tasks with high performance, or at least, with performance comparable to the host system.
Host XP 2600+
VPC 2004
VMWare 4.0
Business Disk
5880
3290
4170
High-End Disk
15700
11600
15700
Business Graphics
864
63,2
87,5
High-End Graphics
1700
91,2
436
FPUmark 3.0/ CPUmark 99
The trend is the same here, where VMWare performs better than VPC2004, altough the CPUmark/FPUMark difference is minimal.
Conclusions
From the benchmark results i've obtained, it's perfectly valid to say that VMWare 4.0 performs better in general than Virtual PC 2004. Take in mind that this is under Windows 98SE. I don't know how VMWare and VPC perform with Linux or other guest OSes. I've FreeBSD 4.9 installed on my VPC2004-Trial and it runs very well, altough the X GUI is somewhat slow.
The area that VPC and VMWare must improve very much is in the graphics subsystem. The performance impact is big both in VMWare or VPC. The advantage of Virtual PC 2004 (and the reason that makes me like it so much) is the standard hardware emulated: S3 Trio, SoundBlaster 16 and a standard DEC network card. In the case of VMWare, the guest operating system needs a special video driver (SVGA II) to display more than an obsolete 640x480, 16 color display. If you want to run, e.g FreeBSD, you are with no luck.
Despite the lower performance, I'm using VPC for it's extremely ease of use, quick setup, and high compatibility. I've successfully ran without problems the following OSes: DR-DOS 5, DR-DOS 6, MS-DOS 6.22, Windows 3.1, Windows NT 3.51, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 95 , RedHat Linux, Suse Linux, FreeBSD 4.9, OpenBSD, OS/2 Warp 3 and Windows Server 2003 Enterprise. VirtualPC is a rock-solid piece of software.
