Virtualization on the Mac seems to be an ever-escalating battle between Parallels and VMware. The latest salvo from VMWare is the Fusion 1.1 beta which brings USB support for synching your iPhone in Windows virtual machines and new "experimental support" for DirectX 9.0 3D graphics.
But don’t rush out and delete your Bootcamp install, serious gamers should keep in mind that Fusion’s DirectX 9 support has some shortcomings. Not only is the DirectX 9 support experimental, it doesn’t work with shaders. According the company, “if a game requires shaders it may not run at all.” Wikipedia has a list of games that require DirectX 9 shaders.
Other noteworthy improvements in the latest Fusion beta include the ability to hide the Windows Taskbar in Unity, the ability to hide the Fusion status bar and better notifications for missing or out-of-date VMware Tools.
Fusion 1.1b also fixes a number of known bugs, but of course the release is a beta — there may be a few bugs still hanging around — and we don’t suggest it in production environments.
It’s also worth noting that, while VMWare can use an existing Bootcamp partition as a virtual machine, the release notes for the beta caution that “using the Bootcamp partition as a virtual machine can, in a few instances, result in a corrupted Bootcamp partition.” I’ve been using my Bootcamp Vista partition in VMMare 1.0 without issue, but definitely keep the warning in mind should you choose to try it.
Now can someone explain to me why the Mac version of VMWare’s tools is so much better than Linux version? Why can’t I get Unity for VMware Workstation in Linux?
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