New VMware Fusion Update in Time for Mac Leopard

With the latest version of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) due out sometime today, the folks over at VMware have announced a new version of its VMware Fusion product, Fusion 1.1 RC1 build 61385.

VMware said that the RC1 version of Fusion has been working well with the pre-release version of Leopard, but that they haven’t officially tested it with the final version due out today. The good news for those existing Fusion users is that the new version will be a free upgrade.

Based on user feedback, VMware has introduced a number of new features and bug fixes in the latest release.

Fusion 1.1 includes preliminary support for Leopard and has added localized versions of the software to include French, German and Japanese. It also added support for 32- and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Vista.

A number of improvements to Unity (the feature that allows you to run Windows applications seamlessly) have also been made. My Computer, My Document, My Network Places, Control Panel, Run, and Search are now available in the Applications menu, Dock menus, and the Launch Applications window. It also improved performance in window dragging and resizing in the Unity view.

A number of Boot Camp improvements have been made as well such as allowing the Boot Camp partition to automatically remount itself after the virtual machine has been shut down. Fusion can also now support Microsoft Vista installed on Boot Camp as a virtual machine.

Graphics have also been updated. They have improved the 2-D drawing performance, especially on the Santa Rosa MacBook Pros. And experimental support has been added for DirectX 9.0 for 3-D graphics and gaming. However, it still doesn’t have shader support, so if a game requires shaders, the game may not run at all. It also doesn’t support 3-D acceleration in Unity view – you must use Single Window or Full Screen view.

You can download the product and find out more information within the Fusion release notes, here.