Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.'"

1 of 554 comments (clear)

  1. 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.