Boot Camp versus Parallels performance

I've tested some 3D Rendering in 3D Studio Max, comparing render
times when running natively via Boot Camp vs running under Parallels.

I set up a Mac Pro 2.66 with 1GB RAM and installed Windows XP SP2 in
Parallels.
I then installed Boot Camp and installed Windows XP SP2 natively. I
made sure I installed the correct SATA drivers at the time of the
Windows installation, however this made little difference to the
rendering times I experienced. It did make a huge difference to the
boot time for Windows and the launch times for apps like 3D Studio Max.

I downloaded a set of tutorial and demo files from the Autodesk
website and tested identical files from Boot Camp and Parallels.

While loading and editing these files, the display performance under
Parallels was quite acceptable. I wasn't able to try with any
massively complex models, but even some of the moderately complex
models seemed to redraw quite fine.
Also, it seems that 3DS Max uses a single thread for the user
interface, so there's not a massive performance hit in Parallels as
it only virtualises one processor.

Here are the test render results.

Rendering the file refractive_caustics.max
Boot Camp, rendering at 1600 x 1200: Total render time 0:61
Parallels, rendering at 1600 x 1200: Total render time: 3:51
Boot Camp is 3.8 times faster

Rendering the file throne_room.max
Boot Camp, rendering at 1600 x 776: Total render time 0:17
Parallels, rendering at 1600 x 776: Total render time: 0:59
Boot Camp is 3.5 times faster

Rendering the file loft_with_art.max, changing the view to Camera01
Boot Camp, rendering at 1600 x 1080: Total render time 1:48
Parallels, rendering at 1600 x 1080: Total render time: 6:45
Boot Camp is 3.7 times faster

This is fairly-well in line with expectations that a well-threaded
application that uses as many cores as it has access to will run
faster on a multi-core machine. Due to other system overheads, you
will never see a linear 4 x increase going from one to four cores,
but this shows that it's around 3.5-3.8 times faster.
It also illustrates that the virtual machine running in Parallels
doesn't suffer much of a performance hit at all for the
virtualisation and runs quite well considering that it's all running
on one core.

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