XP vs Win7

For now I'm just going to stick with 180.48 since that is what I started with. I will come back and revisit the tests with the new 181 drivers later.

Also my point of comparison right now is to show gaming performance difference between Windows 7 as of this exact moment and Windows XP SP3 as of this exact moment. Yes there will most likely be performance changes for Windows 7 (hopefully for the better) but I think people will be happy with these benchmarks as opposed to no benchmarks at all.

I2aMpAnT said:

lol what light should I be seeing?

The headlights on his car before he hits you

I've finished all of the benchmarks and the charts! Hope this information is useful to everyone! =)

Thanks for these.

Doesn't look too bad, not too far behind on XP, considering it's still in beta as well.

A good thing to point out is the minimum fps on XP is a lot lower than Win 7.

It looks like, the vista drivers are optimized for newer games, more so than xp's. I have been using 7 for about a month now, and each release keeps getting better. I think the fps are close enough and probably better than Vista. I did do one test on my own, and that was on 3dmark 2006. XP had a score of 13198 and 7 had a score of 12982. That is close enough for me. Also, It was an older driver, but I remember Vista had a score in the low 12,000's.

Another thing to note, is that no OS from MS has been faster than its predecessor. I think Win 7 will be the first, I hope.

A few things to note about these sets of tests...

It is good to see that you are getting good results from Win7; however, these may not be the best reflective set of tests for everyone.

1) The 9600 and 9800 NVidia series currently have several bugs and performance issues with Vista and Win7 drivers. The 185.xx series correct some of these.

2) In addition to the current bugs with the 9xxx NVidia drivers, other cards will yeild significantly different results. For example if you have a card with lower VRAM, Vista or Win7 will pull ahead of XP because of the GPU RAM Virtualization on higher detail texture settings and AA. This means a 128mb card will get more of a boost from the Vista/Win7 WDDM than a card with 512mb of dedicated VRAM. Also shared memory solutions like onboard video also get more of a boost due to how the WDDM handles VRAM.

3) Older NVidia and ATI series are seeing more improvements in Win7 than the 8xxx and newer NVidia and ATI 2xxx and newer cards are. So a user with a Geforce 7900 should be seeing more of a jump in performance in Win7 over XP.

4) Make sure your FPS and video timing are consistent. Because you state you are running at 75Hz, this doesn’t mean the game on XP will conform to that refresh and could be shifting to a default 60Hz, thus giving more FPS due to refresh timings. As you know VSync forcing and other settings like triple buffering make differences, and they are done differently on XP than on Vista and Win7.

5) I would also suggest that you through in a few ‘older’ games that are DirectX8.1 (or even earlier) and OpenGL 1.x in your test mix. (Many gamers are MMO players and still using games written in the DX8 era)

6) Also run a few rounds of performance tests with DX10 enabled on the newer games, and see if even with the more advanced quality settings DX10 turns on, how the FPS hold up in Win7 compared to the DX9 mode in XP. Part of DX10 and DX11 when games get to either point is the performance enhancements in addition to the new lighting and larger textures allowed.

(A Side note about DX10 and DX11: unless a games is DX10 only, it is running on a hybrid DX9 engine for XP compatibility, and this means that it is usually only turning on the visual enhancements and the core engine wasn’t designed around the more efficient DX10 constructs. When games come out that are DX10 ONLY they will not only be ‘prettier’, but will run faster. Remember the Xbox 360 video system is what the Vista WDDM was designed from, and because the hardware is controlled, the Xbox 360 is actually running DX11 level gaming engine libraries. Which means that Win7 just now catches up the XBox 360. Also the DX10 and DX11 being forced on the XBox 360 is what helps it keep good performance numbers even though the hardware is 3 years old.)

Keep up the good work, and if you have another video card to through in your system to recycle the tests, give that a try for people with lower end system wanting to know how they will fair with Win7. Even an older Geforce 6600 level card is good enough for basic testing.

(Our labs are showing most games have more of an advantage across the board on various GPU/CPU combinations than what your tests are showing, so I know Win7 even looking as good as it does from your tests is still being shorted a bit in what it will offer people. –Sadly we can’t publish this information.)

All the games the I benchmarked by the way were all DirectX 9.0. None of them were 8.1 and the oldest game was HL2: EP2 which runs on DX 9.0.

And I do not have an older video card seeing as my 7600GS had died a few months back in my old PC.