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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solipsism - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Nice review!Anand Effect
— For every mention of Apple and their products the number of people who complain in the comments about Apple, their products and AnandTech’s occasional focus on said products doubles exponentially.
Taft12 - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Not a bad theory, but the "doubles exponentially" part needs some peer review from mathematicians in the crowd (when they stop laughing)Toadster - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
I was very impressed with my upgrade - 65 minutes from start to end!Spivonious - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Not bad, but clean install took under 25 minutes on my E6600 machine.Griswold - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
The magic word is migration. A clean install with nothing else is certainly fast. The installation didnt even take 25 minutes here. The hours to make everything the way I needed it to be afterwards without upgrading from vista, thats what counts. :)mcnabney - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
4.5 hours for an upgrade on a fast hard disk that held ~300GB of apps and data.Butchered the drivers. Made a complete mess of the codecs. I would recomend the clean install since you will likely spend less time re-installing Apps than repairing the damage.
9nails - Saturday, November 7, 2009 - link
I wanted to upgrade from Vista 64-Bit Ultimate to Win 7 Ultimate, but it turns out that MS was handing out 32-bit versions. So no upgrade path from 64 to 32 bit. I did a clean install instead.So far, my only complaint is about the provided wall paper selection. I couldn't find anything that I truly liked. Other than that, Windows 7 is awesome! Solid, fast, and full of good stuff.
bearnet2001 - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Well I'm still on XP 64, not sure if I'll upgrade. Next build I suppose, but I'm not paying out $200 or so just to upgrade a comp with an already fine OS.IdBuRnS - Saturday, October 31, 2009 - link
Why do you need a $200 version? Oh...you don't.just4U - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
I just don't understand why holdouts on XP like to argue how good it is in comparison to Vista... which it obviously is NOT. It seems they fail to realize that ALL OF US used it for a very long time (as operating systems go) So it's not like we don't have some basis of comparison to go on here.That being said, people upgrade when they either have to or want to. I am fine with that. If your still finding XP useful then shoot who am I to argue.