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Gaming On Windows 7

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.'"

7 of 554 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Everything works for me by abigsmurf · · Score: 5, Funny

    Don't you know, Troll actually means "I disagree". Although in this case it likely means "lalala I can't hear you"

  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. Re:Everything works for me by teridon · · Score: 5, Informative

    In the special case where you:
        - have an Nvidia card
        - don't mind using Nvidia's closed-source drivers

    Then setting up dual, hardware-accelerated screens on Linux is also trivially easy -- just run nvidia-settings.

    --
    I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
  4. Re:DX9 vs DX10 / 11 by ShooterNeo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually, the OP is correct. Modern games with a recent graphics card are bottlenecked by the CPU. Specifically, GTA 4 needs a monstrously powerful CPU in order for the engine to draw the city at a decent framerate. This is probably a result of poor programming by the folks that ported the game, but in any case you need a beefy CPU to enjoy GTA4.

  5. Re:Everything works for me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I cannot remember when I last had a bluescreen in XP or any reason to wish for a better sound implementation.

    the sound implementation in Windows Vista and Windows 7 have one thing going for them over XP and older: You can now set and mix volumes at an application level. That gives you the option to quiet down or even silence a particularly annoying program altogether so irrelevant notification beeps won't interfere with a game you're playing or movie that you're watching. It can be surpisingly useful at times.

  6. Re:PC gaming is dead. by 4D6963 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Everyone else has already moved on to consoles

    Translation : I bought a Xbox 360 when it came out and since then I never play PC games anymore, which gives me the feeling that the whole world has done the same as I have.

    Here's a hint : PC gaming has over the last 15 years been given about as many death knells as Apple.

    --
    You just got troll'd!
  7. Re:Everything works for me by cyanid3 · · Score: 5, Informative

    There is a classic theme, what are you talking about? Desktop Personalization > Basic and High Contrast Themes > Windows Classic.

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    loldongs dongslol