Windows 7 Performance Guide
by Ryan Smith and Gary Key on October 26, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Gaming: DX10
For our look at DX10, we have taken cards from both AMD and NVIDIA, and run them through some of the DX10 titles in our test suite. As we're using different cards with different levels of performance, all results are reported as normalized to Vista, rather than as raw framerates.
The short story here is that there is no story. While Vista brought about DX10 and a massive driver architecture change, Win7 does not bring such a change, which also brings about little chance for a performance difference since they share common drivers. Given that, since we're GPU limited so often, Win7 isn't able to help matters. The biggest difference is for our lowest-end cards, the GT 220 and HD 4670, and this is a product of lower framerates producing slightly more variable results when reported in terms of percentages.
Notably, all of our cards do consistently outperform Vista when running under Win7 (if it was truly experimental variation, it would average out to 1) but only by the slimmest of margins. Even for the Radeon HD 5000 series, which enjoys a slightly larger margin, is still close enough that this is a wash. Windows 7 doesn't have a significant impact on gaming performance.
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medi01 - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
I have 32-bit WinXP on PC and 32-bit Vista on notebook. I simply HATE the latter. No matter what I do, it takes longer. But I recall every new OS from microsoft was SIGNIFICALLY (tens of %) faster then the previous one (according to Microsoft ads) yet I never experienced it myself.So, why should I upgrade to Win7 again?
1) Because Win7 is slightly faster in some apps and slightly slower in others? (significally slower when hibernating)
2) New flishy-flashy effects?
3) Puzzling changes in UI, that, I guess, were supposed to make it "even more user friendly"?
4) DirectX 11? Oh, bundling those only with new OSes what a clever move.
And that for about 200$? Are you serious?
MrPete123 - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
Better battery life?Better security? (than XP)
Better stability?
Better performance?
Also the hibernate benchmark is skewed when you consider that 32-bit XP is storing less memory to the hard drive than 64-bit Vista/Win7. 32-bit XP only had to persist ~3 gigs of RAM to the hard drive, while 64-bit Win7/Vista had to persist the full 4 gigs. Hibernating speed is fairly similar in speed between XP and Win7. It would be a better comparison to either limit all machines to 2-3 gigs of RAM for the hibernating test, use 32-bit Vista/Win7 (yuck), or 64-bit XP.
medi01 - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
Better battery life? Even if I would care about battery life, 200$? How much does spare battery pack cost?"Better" security? Huh?
"Better" stability, what's that? Does your XP/Vista crash? Well, mine doesn't. So, if I get resource hungry Win7 it will be "even stabler", huh?
Better performance? A few percent more where it doesn't matter much and huge performance hit, where it does (to me) - hibernate/wakeup?
Why would I care about internal details of who needs to persist what?
So to summarize
If you aren't a gamer who absolutely needs DX 11, you should find better ways to waste your 200$.
rs1 - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
And Homegroups. They puzzingly fail to even mention them in the article, but if you happen to have more than one computer, then Homegroups are awesome, and enough to justify the upgrade all by themselves, in my opinion.damianrobertjones - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
HEY ANAND!When are you going to run this story like you did for OSX the other month?
"Amazon's biggest-selling pre-order product of all time"
That would be Windows 7
lightzout - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
Snow leopard sounds sexy. Windows 7 has the brand appeal of a pocket protector. That said I have to throw my vote in as a very satisied former XP champion. I swore I wouldn't leave XP which still seemed to work fine unless it was for a true upgrade. I am using the Win7 Ult64 RC and its pretty amazing. Example: I installed the analog Media Center Edition TV tuner from my MCE2005 box and hooked up a new DTA that comcast sent me (for free I might add) and when it booted I was worried because I didn't see the familiar "Found new hardware" dialog window. What happened? It was already installed and working. Comcast activated the DTA amd minutes later I realized why I stopped watching TV 10 years ago. 100 channels and nothing on worth watching! At least now I record the few things I do like and watch whenever I want streaming flawlessly through the Xbox 360. The MCE interface with Win7 and the 360 is really well done. Microsoft should have just picked a sexier name.jtleon - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
I wish one of these review sites would compare FLP to 7 - across the board! Microsoft is keeping too many secrets! FLP is much newer than XP, and imho a superior OS to XP in all respects!jtleon
Voo - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
Well only for old hardware.With modern desktop pcs or laptops (I'm not talking about netbooks here), there's no need to pass on the many features it lacks.. it doesn't even has a .NET 3.5 framework as far as I know.
That's far away from "a superior OS to XP in all respects!"
jtleon - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
.NET 3.5 is not supplied with XP - you must download it!jtleon
Voo - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
Afaik there's no .NET 3.5 framework that works with FLP - at least it was so some time ago and wikipedia agrees(well that's not the best source, but the first I found)