Speed tests for Adobe Photoshop under Windows Vista on VMware and Parallels. Which is the fastest?

Parallels Vs VMware running Adobe Photoshop CS3

Testing the speed of Photoshop CS3 running on Windows Vista under Parallels and VMware Fusion for Mac OS X.

The following are the results of several speed tests that we ran using common Photoshop tasks. Firstly we tested the speed of launching Adobe Photoshop in each virtual PC environment.

We then ran a series of common tasks, plugins and filters using Photoshop Actions to test the speed in a wide variety of possible applications. These included simple sharpening and blurring filters, converting color spaces, creating new layers and numerous applications of special effects from the Filter Gallery.

We ran these tests using two images, the first was 23mb and the second a 65mb graphic – a size not unlike one that might be used for the front page of a magazine or brochure.

As well as running the tests under Parallels and VMware Fusion, we ran the same series of tests natively in OS X, for comparison.

Photoshop speed test results

	VMware	Parallels	OS X
Launch Test	6.38	5	2.8
23 mb File Actions Test	35.47	35.51	22.1
65 mb File Actions Test	167.57	246	57.1
All times are in seconds

Adobe Photoshop launch	Photoshop Actions test with 23 mb file

Adobe Photoshop Actions test with 65 mb file

Shorter bars are better.

The first two tests leave little between the two programs and whether this will make a huge difference in a real world scenario is debatable. But the Actions test with the larger Photoshop file are much more clear cut, with VMware emerging as the clear winner.

Some conclusions

It is easy to forget that designers used to run Photoshop on far slower computers than the virtual ones simulated in these tests. Both Parallels and VMware ran our performance tests at perfectly usable speeds, if simply using Adobe Photoshop to create web graphics. The speeds would even be acceptable for occasional use with high resolution graphics files. We suspect that this would unlikely to have been the case with Virtual PC on a PowerPC enabled Mac.