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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
207 Comments
View All Comments
Griswold - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and...">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and...samspqr - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
I agree that you have a point, the comparisons are made by humble users with the hardware we have around and limited time and resources, so they can't be as rigorous as what you'd find in a site like anandtechBUT we're testing something that is interesting and rarely tested, and we're getting some real results saying one should stick to XP in an opengl workstation
I definitely don't think it is FUD
(in particular, in the first link drivers were different in XP and w7, but each of them is the best driver you can use in that platform, so I still think it's a fair comparison, in whick XP came 20% ahead; and the 200% difference between XP and vista in the second link is just breathtaking)
B3an - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
No, you're spreading FUD. I've never seen anything like that from anyone, or on any quality tech sites.I use Win7 + Maya, 3DS Max, Lightwave and others, and it's faster than XP. Period. Theres no comparison between Win7 and a decade old OS.
chrnochime - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
Who cares if you run it faster on 7. Plenty of people well majority of those who buy HP/Dell/Acer etc just surf, do twittering/facebook/work on word/excel/powerpoint/outlook. What makes it faster to run the bloated office 2k7+ apps on 7 than office2k3 on xp? Oh that's right they're barely faster, even slower in some comparison.B3an - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
Wow, most people dont do 3D rendering?? who would have thought! amazing.If you actually bothered to read above, i was replying to a comment about 3D rendering software, you idiot.
samspqr - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
mmm... interesting...would you care coming around here and runing MayaCarBench?
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=307466">http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=307466
thanks
samspqr - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
he didn't, but we got some further results showing xp.64 to be 20% faster than w7.64, on the same hardware and with comparable drivers, for maya viewport performance:http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=307873">http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=307873