VMware Virtualization With OpenGL Still Smacks Oracle VirtualBox

With the ioquake3-based Urban Terror game, VirtualBox was running at frame-rates below 30 FPS for this very latest Apple hardware powered by an Intel Ivy Bridge processor and Intel/NVIDIA graphics. Meanwhile, the latest VMware Fusion release delivered nearly 100 FPS with its Gallium3D driver.

For the last tests of today, Warsow 1.0 was about twice as fast with VMware Fusion as running VirtualBox from the Retina MacBook Pro for the OpenGL performance.

When it comes to the different virtualization choices for Linux desktop use, VMware continues to be my best recommendation. While it's not free, I've found it to be extremely reliable, it offers 3D/OpenGL and 2D guest support using mainline DRM/Gallium3D drivers, offers better performance than VirtualBox, and while KVM/QEMU/virt-manager are also easy to use and nice, it's currently lacking the 3D accelerated guest support generally needed by today's modern desktops. VMware is what's still being used on my main system for these reasons for the superior performance and features.

More Retina MacBook Pro tests with OS X and Linux are on the way.

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