Slashdot Mirror
Windows 7 Gaming Performance Tested
Timmus writes "Gamers holding onto Windows XP may not have to fear sluggish performance when Windows 7 debuts. While Windows Vista's gaming performance was pretty spotty at launch, the Windows 7 beta build seems to handle most games well. Firingsquad has tested the Windows 7 beta against Windows XP SP3 and Vista SP1 on midrange and high-end gaming PCs across 7 different games. While the beta stumbles in a couple of cases, overall it performs within a few percentage points of Windows XP, actually outrunning XP in multiple benchmarks."
But the real question is, will they ditch the DRM? Oh wait.. it's Microsoft.. nah.
Their benchmarks hardly show a conclusive improvement for Windows 7. Vista mostly beats it in DX10, and XP still beats it about half the other benchmarks. It *does* manage to beat Vista in DX9... hardly exciting, but something.
Their mid-range also seems a bit ambitious - more like mid-range of new hardware for serious gamers, which means high-end for the rest of us.
The most interesting paragraph for me:
"because Windows 7 felt more ready to go once the desktop loaded up. Both XP and Vista took at least an extra minute after the desktop loaded to be ready to run applications, while Windows 7 ran Firefox without stuttering or hesitation. "
Now thats something worthwhile. The 2 seconds of "boot time" is irrelevant, being able to use the desktop immediately is a real improvement.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
overall it performs within a few percentage points of Windows XP
overall... not worth it.
Its not my fault, someone put a wall in my way.
http://www.firingsquad.com/print_article.asp?current_section=Hardware&fs_article_id=2404
One page, no adds.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
the story doesn't mention, but this is key.
first, they compare a 32bit xp to a 64bit vista; oranges to grapefruits.
next, they add windows 7 and don't mention if it's 32 or 64.
they did a decent job of being objective... but still fell short of offering us the information that we need. does 7 implement 32 and 64bit functionalities as smoothly as vista64? is it the kind of angry child that 64bit xp is?
bad grammar aside, this review is lacking some fundamental information that should have been disclosed on the first page.
and Windows XP out runs windows 7 and Vista in other benchmarks too..
"actually outrunning XP"? You mean it's possible to make improvements to an OS that *improve* its performance? Shocking.
From the abstract: "overall it performs within a few percentage points of Windows XP, actually outrunning XP in multiple benchmarks". Windows XP was released in late 2001, and in the almost-8 years since, Microsoft has managed to improve performance for my games by "a few percentage points". Not, "alot of percentage points", but only a few. If XP is only marginally worse off then Windows 7 will be, then whats microsoft working on? The flashy looks that I dont see when I have a full screen of zombies being torn apart? While I know that this is only a beta test and should be taken lightly, I can see no major advantage to changing my current setup: linux for working, and xp for gaming. Its been 8 years since XP was released, and its -still- only marginally worse performing then 7. /rant
The 2 seconds of "boot time" is irrelevant, being able to use the desktop immediately is a real improvement.
Amen to that.
That's a feature that I can't get with Vista, XP, or OS X, and it's nearly the one I desire the strongest.
OK, FFS can we stop linking to the BULLSHIT 16 paragraph=16 page articles that are meant to maximize web traffic? PLEASE?
Jesus, please: just copy the damn printable link and get it all on one page.
Slashdot is a fairly heavy-traffic site. You have the throw weight discourage this HORRIBLE style of web page design.
If the print-summary page isn't available then link the CONCLUSIONS page...readers who are smart enough to parse what WinMark scores are can *probably* figure out how to get back to the detail pages.
Here's the damn link: http://www.firingsquad.com/print_article.asp?current_section=Hardware&fs_article_id=2404
-Styopa
They can't be testing games on Windows 7, because there are no games for Windows 7. It's 91 less than Windows 98, and 353 less than the Xbox 360. How can this be compatible with anything? I don't think internal alpha builds of Solitaire count.
... and then they built the supercollider.
8 years. 8 bloody years. 8 YEARS. EIGHT... YEARS. Say it to yourself.
What the bloody hell has MS been doing for the last EIGHT YEARS? XP *still* outperforms their only other two Microsoft offerings in the market since its release. In the eight years BEFORE XP, we start with MS DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 (remember those days?), go through Windows 95, 98, most decent versions of NT and then Windows 2000. From them to XP... spot the difference. Now jump forward eight years instead and look at the difference, eight years on from XP and what have we got? Next to nothing. Oh, a couple of XP Service Packs that made more difference than every *OS* they've released since.
I looked at every graph on the page and they are all within a reasonable margin of error, especially in the absence of certain details (i.e. are the drivers all optimised for XP, Vista and Windows 7 equally? Was Windows 7 running 32- or 64-bit? etc.). There's nothing there that'll make gamer's go "OOHhh... gotta have that". It's more like "Well, if I do get lumped with Windows 7, hopefully it won't be much worse than my existing, well-configured, XP install".
What the hell have they been doing? I've argued before that there are no significant, new features in Vista and/or Windows 7, a myriad of problems still exist with both (and with XP for that matter), the minimum hardware is increasing all the time just to do the same tasks and there's no performance improvement at all (in fact, with Vista, it's quite likely to be the opposite depending on your uses/hardware). They haven't even bothered to comply with most of the legal demands on them in that time. They sort-of-but-not-quite started documenting SMB/CIFS, which hardly kills your current development teams. Is the code for Windows *really* that bad that this is all they could manage?
Alpha, beta, fine - I expect it to be flaky. In fact, I expect all sorts of debugging code and slagging the disk to death while it churns through buckets of debugging data so they can actually fix real-world problems. However, it builds on Vista drivers which, despite much fuss, are pretty well established now. It performs *identically* to Vista in a lot of tests (which suggests that not much at all has changed under the hood, as does the fact that Vista drivers are still compatible). The new features are basically plug-ins to the existing systems, not massive rewrites of critical code. This all leads me to believe that Windows 7 is a Vista Service Pack, to all intents and purposes. So what the hell were they working on for those 8 years of development with one of the largest software development teams in the world?
It was pretty unhappy when I tried to feed it a copy of Grand Theft Auto 4 to play.
I had to fool the installer by using compatibility mode. And now some background process is giving errors about not being able to find a disk in my media card readers drive.
DRM sucks. GTA4 on PC sucks. Securom sucks.
A new version of an operating system actually working better and more efficiently than the last version? Oh my how will this end; surely someone have made a mistake. My past experience dictates that this is exactly the opposite of how things should be. Each new version should siphon away more and more of the resources to pointless and trivial tasks to ensure that we never get the full capacity of our computer; thus increasing our incentive to buy new shiny gadgets and hardware! Oh bring back the glory days of our past!
And so on and so on and so on.
The Long Now Foundation
Disappointing that they did not test performance on Linux with Wine or Crossover Games. Not every game will run on that but for those that do, the performance comparison could be very interesting. They could also test the performance of the games under ReactOS. Comparing several releases all from the same company, always from the same one company, gets boring after a while.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The general sentiment and tone of your comment is exactly the same of when XP was getting ready to come out. Everyone at Slashdot swore left and right that XP was bloated to hell, that it'd run too slow, and nobody would buy it, and it would signal the downfall of Microsoft. The interface so horrible that Joe Sixpack was finally going to wake up and switch to Linux. If not the interface, then product activation would. No, Win2k was their last great OS, and it can't possibly get any better than that.
And, here we are, someone arguing that Windows 7 is just Vista relaunched. I should remind you that XP is essentially just 2000 with a few interface tweaks. The driver model stayed the same, the kernel version was bumped up by .1, and it was a little more polished. If it took Microsoft 5 years to go from XP to Vista, what makes you think they could implement severe changes in only 2 years time?
Anyway, I should get going, facts are never welcome in these parts.
I guess Microsoft's is "features" instead of performance. Hasn't the saying "what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away" been proven true time and again?
Running Vista64 since day one, and Windows 7 for a while, I must say internally both systems look similiar. Some article TL to quote stated that Seven is to Vista like 98SE was to 98. It does not take a rocket scientist to guess MSFT would never release such a dud like XP64 again - it's been overdone (can you say that?) by now.
Plain old sigh.
For me, the single biggest problem with Windows 7 gaming is the lack of PunkBuster support, as EvenBalance are refusing to support the beta at this stage.
Fair enough, it is their choice, however the beta is public, so many of their customers are in the same boat here. It seems sad that the public statements seem to indicate they are not even willing to look at it.
All you haters look like idiots until the product gets released. On the day of release, come back here and dump on MS. Until then, I won't crap on Linux kernels I haven't used yet either.
Although it is the minority API used for gaming, it still does exist. As long as John Carmack is still pumping out gaming engines, there will be games based on OpenGL. Does anyone here have any first-hand experience on OpenGL performance in Windows7?
Not when I try to run X3 Terran Conflict.
Because the Tages DRM garbage that the publishers insisted on inflicting on Egosofts game isn't compatabile with Windows 7 even though it works OK on Vista (which came as a shock).
Are Tages doing anything about it ? Nope, they take the Creative Labs view that they don't support beta systems.
I leave it to the reader to decide whether the defective by design belongs with Tages or Microsoft.
Maybe it's optimistic moaning... the point of a beta is to get feedback.
With no feedback, nothing gets fixed.
The more vocal people are about their issues, the more likely they are to be fixed.
Some gamers still think that Windows 7 is MinWin. Maybe misinformation had something to do with Microsoft's next OS sounding good.
Whats the harm in yelling 'Computer, end program!'? You could be living in Star Trek! Go on.. give it a try.
Let me preface this comment by stating that I am not a MS fanboy by any means. But I do have to say this about Windows 7: Yea so Windows 7 isn't as fast as XP. Did anyone ever really consider the fact that it is a newer OS that is doing MORE than XP? The fact that it looks better, and does more than XP but still runs comparably fast as XP is a feat. If you are really that concerned about performance, why don't I see you using some type of DOS port? Or linux at the command line? All I am saying is that MS is in a lose / lose battle when it comes to their OS. If they drop features to make it faster than XP then everyone will bitch that it doesn't have those features. But if they keep them in there, people will bitch because it isn't as fast as XP.
Actually, after looking at the benchmarks this is what I came away thinking about Vista, Win7, XP overall.
If you want DX10 performance, Vista.
If you want DX9 performance on iCore7, Win7.
If you want DX9 and have a midrange system, most do, WinXP.
The article's take on the results can be summarized in two words, "mixed bag."
Ironically, Slashdot comes away with a bright and sunny view on things.
Their analysis as usual does not coincide with the reality presented by the results.
Of course, it all depends on what games you most prefer to play, for example Far Cry plays poorly in XP in all cases versus Vista/Win7.
I find it interesting they have no benchmarks in DX10 for Fallout 3, CoD: Waw, and several more. I looked into it just now and these particular titles lack DX10 support.
What this all means is, if you haven't upgraded to an iCore7 and most interesting games still use DX9, stick with XP. If you only play DX10 games, stay with Vista regardless what architecture you're on. Win7 fails at DX10, except in FarCry where it only does one or two fps better than Vista.
There you go, an honest analysis of the results.
While it is true that a 32-bit app usually runs a bit slower on a 64-bit system than a 32-bit system (we are talking a few percent) I think it is as much or more to do with the small amount of overhead the Windows on Windows emulation incurs rather than larger words. The FSB has plenty of bandwidth for that.
However what you discover is that when apps are recompiled to 64-bit, they are often faster, even if they shouldn't be. Prime95 found that. The program is all FP calculations and is done using SSE2 instructions. Thus there shouldn't be an improvement going to 64-bit... But there is, somewhere in the realm of 10%.
I've not seen any code profiling done that would show conclusively as to why, but I've seen speculation that it is due to the larger number of general purpose registers available in the x64 ISA.
now I can't say if it was the fault of the OS, TV, or laptop, but my mother did have a new (within the year) large-screen TV and an equally new laptop, but could not get her blu-ray disks to play to the TV over the HDCP connection. Other output would work, but trying to play BD discs would just pop up an HDCP error on the TV.
I can't say whether it was the OS or the hardware those, since XP won't run on that particular laptop due to lack of drivers.
You really can't beat some of the old, light weight OSes for speed. DOS will probably give you the best app performance you'll ever get. Why? Because DOS doesn't do anything. DOS will load your program and then get the hell out of the way unless you specifically place a call to one of its few services. It doesn't manage memory, it doesn't handle processes, it just does disk operations (it's well named).
For that very reason, you still see it used in embedded systems today. It loads up whatever app it is that the system runs and that's all it does. The app deals with the hardware directly at that point. Zero processor overhead, almost zero memory overhead, etc. If you need that, and want maintained code, there are projects like FreeDOS that do just that.
However, people aren't really interested in that. I do not at all miss the DOS days. People want OSes that do more. As it happens, we also have far more capable systems. There is plenty more CPU and RAM around to be used. So it would be silly for OSes not to use it, and provide more enriched services to the users.
What's funny to me is how bent out of shape people get about minor differences on benchmarks. Ok so the new OS has a few percent lower FPS in a game than the old one. Why do you care? Does it make a difference in actual gameplay?
I really think the bitching about that falls in to three equally invalid categories:
1) People who have old systems that really don't perform well. Ok well then don't upgrade to a new OS. New OSes are for NEW hardware (imagine that). If you have an old system with an old OS that works well, keep it. Don't expect a new OS to be designed for your old stuff.
2) People who use benchmarks as some sort of epenis measure. They just want the biggest numbers, they don't care if it matters to actual usage. These people need to STFU. It doesn't matter if XP gets 80fps and Vista only gets 75fps. You won't notice the difference in actual gameplay.
3) People who just like to bitch about new things, regardless.
Surely most of the system resources should be going to the resource hungry game. And DX calls shouldn't have a huge overhead. Why is there ever more than a half percent difference?
XP is the last operating system to which the owner can determine the true rights of the stated persons having account in its registries. Even XP's license is shady at times, trying to use the EULA to overlay the capabilities of the OS with such key token phrases as "obey all international laws" and other unrelated matters for which it never had the perview to decide. XP is actually an extension of Windows 2000, and if you look at the timeline correctly then you'll know that Windows 2000 was the last platform for which hosted a port to the DEC/Compaq/HP Alpha processor. Ever since Windows 2000, the Alpha processor has been split into Intel rights and AMD patenting. Ever since Microsoft gained its Alpha performance advantage of Alpha back on the cloaked VMS back-end of Windows NT 3.51, there has been a fleeting battle to liquidate DEC to roll into Compaq and HP through the antiquity of postponing development on a superior product. Sure, there's Windows 2003 (Longhorn disguised and 64-bit Windows XP), but there is only one true Windows XP that holds the last red thread to a golden chord attached to the core of all Microsoft's pre-monopoly splendor of the POSIX'd Windows 2000 environment. The recent developments of Microsoft are unlike anything anyone has ever seen; whole legislators and judiciary in foreign nations and foreign states are influencing the development of this corporation as though it is in a dependent and submissable United States of its own; and separate from The United States in this regard, it continues on a development path that it is unsure of itself.
If Microsoft was unhindered in its investments and development, what do you think it would try to work upon? Even Anti-Virus software is judicially hindered from integrating into all recent and completely-unique Trees of Devlopment in its operating system compilations. Microsoft has become an agent of GOVERNMENT and no long is anywhere in the shadow of the centerpeice on software theory and logical implementation. It is being created as a tool to remotely manage the rights of another from an agency that is closely integrated into the clerk of a court for a complaint to move its procedure to effect the ruling. The nature of money as it stands would prove that once the property is in the hold of the buyer, that the creator has no authority to decide or impress how it may be used, yet today there is no money but federal credit through House Joint Resolution 192 to promote a maintenance mode to continue after a Conditional sale or "rent" as it may say in statute. Microsoft isn't become a shell of its former self because none authentically endorse or support its developments but the bias of judiciary the interweaves with a for-profit executive: Microsoft is become Hell on earth to whomever is pre-decided to deploy their labors to work by their wares.
Just go to GNU/Linux for all distribution. Break bread already.
It's called a joke.
... and then they built the supercollider.