VMware Fusion 3
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VMware Fusion 3
Noticeable Performance Improvements, but 3D Gaming May Be a Bit of a Stretch
I have a 2009 17" MacBook Pro that I use with VMWare Fusion 2 to do Windows development and as impressed as I was with VMWare's Fusion 2 offering, I thought its weak point was performance, especially when using desktop operating systems that relied on 3D graphics. That's why when reading about VMWare's latest offering, I was excited to buy the upgrade to test out the promised improvements from the 64-bit foundation leveraging Snow Leopard's advancements, and the integrated 3D capabilities to add things like Windows Aero (3D transparent-bordered windows) support.
What I found was that Fusion 3 did indeed offer a faster, more responsive experience in every Windows operating system I tried from Windows Server 2008 to Vista to Windows 7. To add a caveat, the performance was actually very slow until I installed the latest version of VMWare tools on each system (a necessity for all versions of VMWare Fusion), which I suspect may be the source of the performance problems other reviewers mentioned when first trying Fusion 3, but after VMWare tools installation, everything ran a bit faster than with the previous version of Fusion.
I also ran "Windows Experience" tests on both my old PC-migrated Vista VM and a fresh installation of Windows 7 and whereas the old score was 1.0 (terrible) for both systems because of (lack of) 3D performance, the new scores came in at 2.7 for my old Vista migration and 3.5 for the fresh copy of Windows 7 with the weak point still being 3D capabilities. Not bad. More than enough to run Aero for sure, and perhaps enough to support older 3D games. I wouldn't get my hopes up for being able to run Modern Warfare 2 in a VM on your Mac with any sort of tolerable frame rate, however.
In general, I always liked how VMWare feels like a more native Mac application than other virtualization solutions and "Unity", the ability to run a Windows app in Mac OS X as if it were a Mac-native app, is even improved and more integrated in this latest version! VMWare has a long history of making great virtualization software with some of the widest support of operating systems, and Fusion 3 takes a good thing and makes it even better.
Overall I think it's the best virtualization solution for the Mac in general, and its performance enhancements make it a worthwhile upgrade for current users of VMWare Fusion 2.