Does windows 7 lower game performance

Games running in windows vista took a 20% performance hit and if you look on the back of many of the newer games, they have seperate min/recommended system requirements for vista, which are often much higher.

I've been out of the loop for a while so i don't know much about the latest hardware/software/OSs and If windows 7 is as bad for gamers as vista is.

My laptop (the one in the sig) is old as heck, but it's held up pretty well (I can run crysis and fallout 3 on medium low settings with pretty good framerates). I want to be able to take advantage of my em64t Pentium 4, but it won't be worth it if I have to go with an operating system that slams my already low-end machine

 

Are you running Vista on that machine?

If so, then yes, Win7 will give you better performance, Vista doesn't even compare to Win7, it rocks.

Microsoft have created a killer O/S at last.

 

yes, Some people (including me) believe that Win7 will be the new XP, as Vista was the new ME Why? The Win7 beta was much more stable than XP's.

 

The Win7 beta was more stable than the latest Vista lol.

 

Hmm, no proof or cited source. I stopped reading there.

Care to give evidence of that? Because I can guarantee you none of my games magically started performing 20% worse when I installed Vista over XP for the first time.

 

Lol right...cuz the consensus that XP sucked never existed either

 

I remember reading gaming benchmarks a couple of months back and the difference was maybe 1-5% in favor of win 7 over vista but for the most part still lagging a little behind xp. Of course driver differences and the fact that the win 7 they ran may be slightly different that what ships later this month I would guess that improvement will be slightly more when compared to vista. I don't really feel like looking for the article but I know it was from a reputable source like toms, anand, or trustedreviews.

 

Hmm, no proof or cited source. I stopped reading there.

Care to give evidence of that? Because I can guarantee you none of my games magically started performing 20% worse when I installed Vista over XP for the first time.

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Ok, now is it really necessary to get so condescending over stinkin operating system? Shouldn't you be on the IGN forums?

I cited the fact that newer games have a separate, higher set of system reqs listed for Vista.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/38220/

Maybe you can explain to me why the system requirments are insanely higher on Vista. No seriously I'm not trying to be a condescending jerk, I just don't know.

 

Are you looking at the bottom of that page by chance when talking about system requirements?

 

my bad, not all the reqs, just the ram.

 

omg. even i think that is a stupid comment. he wasnt trying to prove vista lowers game performance he was asking if win 7 is better. god stop being a troll.

 

Let me help you



Anyway, the difference will be negligible, a benchmark I actually showed Windows 7 ahead of all versions of Windows XP and Vista.

 

It is not 100% true that Vista have lower performance.
If you do tweak Vista and shutdown those useless start-ups and programs that designed in Vista. Your performance will increase.
In addition, Vista used DX 10 which is better than XP(DX 9 only).
While Windows 7 have DX 11 which is the best currently.
Yet, MS said Vista will be support DX 11 in the future as well.
DirectX play an important role on gaming performance.

 

Resident Evil 5 benchmark performs faster in Win7 for me. That's using the WDM 1.1 ATI drivers that come with Win7 versus the latest Catalyst 9.9 drivers fpr XP. Comparison is:

XP/DX9=30.6FPS
Win7RC1-32bit/DX9=32.4FPS

 

Did not read all the replys but going from the OP post.

> Yes Vista did take a toll on game performance moving from XP at first however it was only a short while before that gap was closed up with new drivers and updates to games.

At this point there is no gap anymore and Vista runs just about every game imaginable just as good as XP or even better.

Win 7 so far has only promised better results than Vista, and since it is so similar to Vista already it should not be a big change for the games or the drivers.

Last time I read the ATI drivers release notes it had stuff in there like "Boost XXX game performance by up to 20% in Windows 7 only" because they are finding it easier to make drivers and boost performance on Win 7 than they are Vista it looks like.

If your a gamer get Win 7, or stay with Vista for now. There is no reason to use XP anymore unless your playing legacy games that cant even run on Vista (then dual boot dont use XP as your primary).

 

Short answer is "no".

Win7 is benching same/better than Vista OR XP in most cases (recent games)

Note, that really doesn't mean much as frankly Vista and XP are equivalent as long as you are using current drivers.

Windows 7 IS simply a cleaned-up and rebranded version of Vista.
This is a good thing.

 

Here are some 3rd party benchmarks read em for yourself

http://www.driverheaven.net/articles.php?articleid=137&pageid=1
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=682&type=expert&pid=28
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2343317,00.asp
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/windows_7_gaming_performance/default.asp

 

A reminder to check the dates on those reviews...

Only Driver Heaven's article is less than 6 months old.

Everything else was done with beta or prerelease OS software, and immature driver sets and Win7 was still doing pretty well.

 

Yeah I just searched in google and linked the first available articles.

The driverheaven article was published less than a month ago and shows xp about 10% behind vista and vista 0-5% behind win 7 depending on game.

When I answered the op's question, but with no sources cited, I mentioned the fact that comparing gaming performance before win 7 is released and the drivers mature is not really indicative of real-world performance. At this point nobody can say exactly what the differences will be. But it makes sense (doesn't mean its true) to assume that if 6 months ago with beta win 7 and beta drivers it performed at least on par with vista and part of the time better that when it ships average gaming performance will be better.

 

this topic reminds me of how 3dmark06 always favors xp over vista. Silly benchmark.

 

/wink

Any ONE benchmark should not make decisions for you.
(unless perhaps you only ever play one game and the benchmark in question IS that game)

3dmark06 has its uses as long as the comparisons are apples to apples.
It IS believeable that beta Win7 DX9 drivers are less advanced than XP or even Vista DX9 drivers.

 

1 thing i found nice is the fact that w7 disables aero while gaming...

 

Hmm I dont seem to have any performance increase from having Aero on or off in Vista.

This doesn't seem to be an issue in Vista either.

 

win7 is basically a really optimized version of vista, all the useless craps been removed which gives it a greatly smaller footprint, so thats gonna help right of the bat compared with vista which choked resources pretty good.

Since its 64bit like vista, more memory is available especially since we are will above the realm of 3.3gb if memory. see previous comment for 7 vs Vista.

the new directx wont help right now since nothings really there to implement dx11, as for driver optimizations and things like that, performance is really smooth even for a rc which is what im on right now.

Win7 is a nice answer to the previous blunder, though in itself, as for every operating system, if you dont configure it right, your performance will suck anyways. a general rule of thumb to maximize performance....

-kill all the crap running besides the games
-make sure you have a decent amount of memory
-keep system maintained, gtfo viruses and spyware
-make sure machines not overheating
-dont crank everything on insane and hope your hardware can handle it.
-Sure os updates will help squeeze performance as the drivers mature, but thats the same for any os.

so far, going from the pro of the bunch, good ol stable xp, compared to 7, performance hasnt noticeable increased/decreased, but things do look noticeable clearer in eve, and somewhat in cod5, though that could just be human error as i along with everyone else is looking for some amazing groundbreaking difference in this new os. Though i seem to remember someone saying the new oses had better support for all of the higher eve candy features, such as vsync, which makes games look noticeable smoother, vista had that enabled by default, which many games didnt have native support for, or wasnt enabled unless you enabled it.

 

QFT.

Win7 really is the eye candy of Vista optimized which was taking up too much system resources. If you look at the list of changes in Win7, they really haven't introduced any changes to the core OS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7#Core_operating_system

To me this sounds like the biggest issue:

 

im at a loss for what qft means, but that sounds about right for windows 7, my biggest happy thing they did is made sure there was good ad2p support for 7, i likes me bluetooth very much so.

The one interesting standpoint is the scalability of windows 7, which basically confirms what xtt found, since win7 beta, which is ultimate mind you, works well on netbooks, with their wimpy little processors and weaker integrated graphics. (gotta be careful not to let my netbook hear this). whereas microsoft for that very reason i imagine dared not release these machines with anything but vista basic, to keep aero from nubbing system resources.

 

Windows 7 beta was faster for most of my games (in fact just about all my software...) than the first release of vista.

Right now various benchmarks seem to agree that 7 beta is either the same or for some games a tiny bit slower than an up to date vista install.

The fact a beta can match vista is amazing really. Most of the drivers are just adapted for vista drivers for windows 7. When windows 7 goes to retail and all the latest drivers are certified for windows 7 the leap in performance will be huge. Within 6 months exect windows 7 to be faster in every way than vista ever was/will be.

It's a safe bet to go beta now. You are very unlikely to notice any performance drop at all.

 

agreed, seeing as how most manufacturers are or have released standalone drivers, youre good to go, i'm using the RC which is identical to the retail version, and have just reinstalled with native win7 drivers for everything, including nvidia drivers just released on the 22nd of sept. all my games run just the same, if not a little better

 

ok man, i have windows 7 final from my uni and when playing batman on vista highest setting, it lags. after installing windows 7, same settings have absolutely no lag... windows 7 rocks!

 

Is it really that amazing? Windows 7 is Vista with only a few changes that might effect performance.

I like Windows 7, I'm running it now, but I don't understand why people think its that much better than Vista.

I think the psychology of this whole Windows 7 hype thing is interesting.

 

I have to agree, i dont see any real changes when gaming/moddeling/texturing blah blah software when comparing win 7 to vista, but win 7 was a beta and it did feel much more stable to a degree (and alt tabbing was much much more responsive.)

I suppose in the long run, we need to wait for W7 to come out properly, for now Vista does its job just fine.

 

Properly? Umm Microsoft themselves announced that there will be almost no changes between build 7100 (RC) and RTM except for a few driver compatibilty issues fixed and minor bugs. To me Windows Vista is like Windows 98 and Windows 7 is like Windows 98 SE.

 

No; its grossly overhyped. People were praising the beta talking about how much better it was then Vista, so I went and tried the RC, figuring it would be even better than the beta. Of course, I was terribly disappointed. Is it better than Vista? Yes, I will give it that. Does it deserve the hype it got? No, not even close. Ive been using the RC for the past 5 months, and Im still far from impressed. Windows 7, to me, is essentially Vista SP3, which M$ should not be charging for.

 

It could have been a brilliant marketing strategy we never saw coming... We THINK that Microsoft released Windows 7 as wanting to truly improve upon Windows Vista when they could have had this whole thing in mind since Vista since now that i think of it, the only changes from Vista and Windows 7 were interface, kernel tweaks, and how processes open up delayed now to give the user an impression of speed when they first get to desktop view and open a program. They could have done this intentionally to make even more money tricking people int othinking they created an OS that is worth paying for.

 

Windows 7: Lord of Destruction

 

tl;dr

go for windows 7

 

I think this is a bit unfair.

While Windows 7 is indeed a tuned and polished version of Vista, it has some internal changes that warrant the difference between say Win95 and Win98.

I DO think that M$ should indeed be offering a more lucrative UPGRADE price from Vista however... (the disk ONLY upgrades Vista)
This would be a nice nod to the people who helped them make Vista, and thus Win7, better. (note, this changes nothing for me personally... I have a free retail copy from work)

The real win here is getting people to stop the pity train for Vista... it really is quite good now.

 

Unfair? Maybe. True? Definitely. W7 is madly overhyped. The only reasons I will use it is because it is a little better than Vista, has some aspects that I like over Vista ( such as the start menu additions, which are actually quite trivial ), and will be supported more. All that and of course because I can get a free copy from MSDNAA.

This actually kind of reminds me of Nvidia:

"A core modification here, another ROP there, an added cluster ( or unlocked ) of Shader cores over there, and....VOILA! New GPU!".