VMware Fusion 3 has been announced this week and the company has some impressive new features aimed at making the product more appealing and better performing than its archrival Parallels. In late September Autodesk announced an official partnership with Parallels Inc. to support Autodesk Windows applications on Mac under Parallels’ virtualization solution.
VWware Fusion 3 – Further Performance Boosts
The competition between these two formidable virtualization software companies is a boon to Mac users wishing to run both native Mac and Windows applications at the same time on Apple hardware. VMware Fusion 3 adds performance enhancing capabilities in a new and more efficient virtualization engine that is less taxing on the Mac’s CPU, a very important feature for mobile computers running on batteries in particular.
It also sports a 64-bit engine and support for Mac OS X’s 64-bit kernel in Snow Leopard. There is full support for Windows 7, including its Aero interface and Flip 3D task switching.
Lastly, there is improved support for DirectX 9.0c with Shader Model 3 (good for gaming, useless for CAD and 3D) and OpenGL 2.1 graphics–which is essential for running Windows-only CAD and engineering applications on your Mac. Our blog post goes into the CAD story in further detail.
Other Niceties
VMware Fusion 3, which will ship on October 27, 2009, has several other nice features, including a new migration utility that lets you import a real PC’s Windows installation over to a Mac, over the network. This is more flexible than the USB-based solution that Parallels delivers and it is more business-oriented.
There is also a new menu for your Windows apps that appears on the right-hand side of the Mac OS X menu bar.
To learn more about VMware Fusion 3 go here.