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Gaming On Windows 7

Posted by Soulskill on from the extreme-minesweeper dept.

Jason Wilson writes "Windows 7 comes out Oct. 22, and many gamers are wondering whether it will be a boon for gaming, as Microsoft promised Vista would, or a disappointment (like Vista was at its launch). Former ExtremeTech editor Jason Cross, who's covered games and tech for 13 years, discusses the pluses and minuses of Windows 7 for gamers — how it differs from Vista, if it'll run older games, and the benefits of 64-bit computing. 'Windows 7 basically takes the Vista codebase and rewrites, refines, optimizes, and overhauls most of the internal stuff without making dramatic changes to the driver stacks that Vista did over WinXP. The changes to the fundamental driver models are small and mostly serve to improve performance. Plus, the hardware makers — especially the graphics guys — are on top of the changes this time around. Nvidia and ATI have been shipping quite good Win7 graphics drivers for months now.'"

5 of 554 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Everything works for me by Tukz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why the hell is that modded as "Troll"?!

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    - Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
  2. Performance increase... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I installed the Windows 7 RC pretty much straight off, I didn't jump on the Vista bandwagon, I stuck with XP for a few reasons.

    1) Cost
    2) Gaming Performance
    3) I had no need for DX10

    Anyways, What I found in 7 was that gaming performance in about 70-80% of my games had improved, even on very early drivers.

    Crysis was up by on average 30fps
    Source games had an improvement of about 15fps
    Unreal Engine games had little improvement, about 2-3fps

    So far I'm very impressed with 7.

  3. Does it matter, its all DirectX by physburn · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Don't Windows games almost entirely run upon the DirectX layer, so it doesn't much matter what the window version is under that. Just as long as it stable and Windows 7 promises to be much stabler, at least thats what microsoft say. Knowing microsoft it would probably take until the service release before it actually stable.

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    3D Shooter GamesFeed @ Feed Distiller

  4. Re:PC gaming is dead. by kno3 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't agree. Demand for PC games is still very high, and although they may not be coming out at the same time, PC versions of games are still coming out in decent numbers. There are also plenty of titles that are released exclusively on PC, like Crysis.

    Also most hardcore gamers with the will to get the best out of their system use Vista64. There are just so many advantages, like DX10, proper 64bit support, better multi-core support, etc... I use Vista and have appsolutely no problems with it. You just have to set it up correctly, get rid of the stupid theme and animations, and disable things like the UAC and you have a brilliant OS with basically no drawbacks compared to XP (on a recent computer). And I'm not a M$ lover, I use Ubuntu for a lot of my desktop work.

    Also, PCs have DRM too, its bloody irritating!

  5. Re:Everything works for me - But..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So far, I've really had nothing to complain about, the new UI aside. I was pretty pissed that there was no classic theme.

    I'm still pissed about Vista not having the XP style. That one was much nicer.

    I miss the Windows 2000 style!!! I always turned XP to Win2K style, and got a nice performance boost because of it. I also HATE, absolutely HATE not being able to see all my programs / start menu by default. I do NOT want Windows to organize it, I want to organize it myself.

    File searching still sucks, XP/2K did this way better, and faster, ironically, than the indexed searches in Vista/Win7.

    The only thing I do like is the ability to search for a start menu item (which, sadly I need to do now... ) and find it quickly. But the 'smart menu' system makes me 'forget' about programs since they get hidden. Aggravating!

    I sent in several bugfix/feature requests about this during the beta... everyone I know at work (IT Dept) hates the vista file browser and searching, we are always VM'ing or RDP'ing to XP boxes just to execute searches. How sad is that? I can honestly say I don't mind that stupid search dog anymore... lol. well.. ok, I just hate him less than vista/win7 file browser and searching.