Parallels 11 Benchmarks vs. Parallels 10 and Boot Camp

Virtual Machine Management

If you plan to use just a single virtual machine and leave it running most of the time, this section is probably not for you. However, for those users who frequently run or access lots of virtual machines, we wanted to see what improvement, if any, Parallels 11 brings when it comes to boot, suspend, resume, and shut down times.

As with the previous section for File Transfers, these tests were measured manually with a stop watch, and conducted five times each. The numbers in the chart below represent seconds, with a lower number equaling faster performance.

Do you remember when we mentioned earlier how Parallels wasn’t going to support Windows 10 on older versions of the software, and that while it would likely work, it wouldn’t work well? Yeah, this is probably a good example of that. Despite double- and triple-checking everything, there was some serious issue with booting our Windows 10 VM under Parallels 10, with the cold boot taking nearly four times as long as Parallels 11.

Other VM management tasks were much closer, with Parallels 11 winning two out of the remaining three tests (and barely losing the third), but that initial boot with Parallels 10 was painful in comparison to Parallels 11. Again, however, without getting too caught up in the details, these numbers (even that 38+ seconds for Parallels 10) only really matter if you’re frequently starting up and switching between multiple virtual machines throughout the day. If you’re the typical user who boots or resumes their Windows VM once in the morning and leaves it running until the end of the day, the main takeaway is that Parallels 10 is pretty fast in most management situations, and Parallels 11 is even faster.

Table of Contents

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1. Introduction
2. Parallels 11 Feature Overview
3. Hardware, Software, and Testing Methodology
4. Geekbench
5. 3DMark (2013)
6. 3DMark06
7. Cinebench R15
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8. PCMark 8
9. Passmark PerformanceTest 8.0
10. x264 Encoding
11. x265 Encoding
12. File Transfers
13. Virtual Machine Management
14. Conclusions
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