FiringSquad broke out the benchmark-o-matic and went to town on Windows 7 beta, Vista and XP. They used a pair of rigs, one mid-range and the second high end, to compare gaming performance under the aforementioned operating systems.
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Right now, Windows 7 is kind of a mixed bag. While it was able to beat both Vista and XP in certain applications, it also got beat in others. 3DMark06 gave a clear advantage to XP on both of our test beds, while Vantage favored Vista by about 10%. However, real world performance brought our numbers to a much narrower margin, with Windows 7 performing admirably in both DX9 and DX10 modes. Crysis still favors Vista pretty heavily as it officially trounced Windows 7 by 16 frames per second on average on our high-end test bed. The margin was closed when we take a look at our mid-range setup, when that gap shrunk to a one frame difference.
I'm pretty sure they've violated the EULA for the beta... I'm pretty sure Microsoft states that you cannot benchmark Windows 7 because it's in beta, right?
I wouldn't say anyone could "go wrong" with going to Windows 7, based on what they show. I imagine a lot of improvements can still be made.
Yes, Microsoft will be none too pleased with them. I doubt they'll get sued, but they might get a take-down notice.
That said, these kinds of numbers mean verrry little until the driver writers have had more time to get their shit together (and the MS guys have had a few more months to tighten up the code). All we really know now is that Windows 7 has the possibility of being fairly awesome - or rather, there's no evidence saying that that will be impossible.
Yeah well, all I know is that all my games ran great on XP and not run with extremely uneven framerates in 7. It's like the hard drive is thrashing, but I disabled indexer, defender, scheduled defrag, superfetch, and so on. It still performs fucking horribly. Its like a series of microstutters, once per second.
Yeah well, all I know is that all my games ran great on XP and not run with extremely uneven framerates in 7. It's like the hard drive is thrashing, but I disabled indexer, defender, scheduled defrag, superfetch, and so on. It still performs fucking horribly. Its like a series of microstutters, once per second.
Jeez, that sucks. With the exception of copying files using Windows Explorer, I've had no drawbacks in my XP-to-7 upgrade. I've even had plenty of pleasant little oh-nifty surprises, but I couldn't tell you how many of those things had already been implemented in Vista. I'll be kinda sad when August 1st comes.
Jeez, that sucks. With the exception of copying files using Windows Explorer, I've had no drawbacks in my XP-to-7 upgrade. I've even had plenty of pleasant little oh-nifty surprises, but I couldn't tell you how many of those things had already been implemented in Vista. I'll be kinda sad when August 1st comes.
...and no, I'm not shilling for Microsoft.
I like a lot of things about 7 as well. But until Microsoft understands that performance is the #1 priority, they will lose out on another sale from me.
If you think its performance will improve dramatically from now until release you're mistaken. Just take a look at the current state of Vista for your answer. XP is still the gaming platform of choise for those who value maximum performance.
Those numbers actually look promising if they are in a beta stage. At beta they are already running better than Vista. And using the new processor technologies (Core i7) it is comparable to Windows XP. I have a feeling the end product may be something we can actually move up to.
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"I am willing to allow that gamers are more prone to violence so long as we agree that this violence is largely directed against peripherals." ~Tycho (Penny Arcade)
If you think its performance will improve dramatically from now until release you're mistaken. Just take a look at the current state of Vista for your answer. XP is still the gaming platform of choise for those who value maximum performance.
Oh come on now... I really like Vista and all my games run great. As long as you're not trying to play your games with Vista on a Dell with a Pentium4, 1 GB of RAM and the onboard system video you should be fine.
Windows 7 was nice but had too many bugs for me. My Microsoft OneCare anti-virus wasn't compatable, my Microsoft Zune wouldn't work correctly and it just seemed like they were hiding too many setup options from me.
I just want to point out that Vista was supposed to be the minor upgrade, however it turned into a full blown release. So a lot of the issues were obviously not worked out. Windows 7 is getting a slight face lift, but you will see huge performance increases by the time they release. Windows 7 is kind of their minor release, but not like Windows ME. I really enjoyed Windows XP it is a great OS. I have since moved on to Vista and tweaked it to perform how I expect. It took me about 2 hours of trolling the internet to find out all I needed to make Vista perform. I look forward to Windows 7, but this will require a hardware upgrade on my part. Seeing what the beta can do with a Core i7 proc, that is the route I am going to go. I can expect the final release to be much better.
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"I am willing to allow that gamers are more prone to violence so long as we agree that this violence is largely directed against peripherals." ~Tycho (Penny Arcade)
