Windows 7 Gaming Thread

I'm developing this thread so people can help create a database of which games work with whatever setup you have, and how well the games work, along with extra comments on Windows 7 Beta. If you can, please comment on compatability and any issues that arise with running whatever game you're trying to run.,

i want to help get people to gather information for gaming in windows 7 to Microsoft and to figure out which games work for those who want to try out Windows 7 without actually going through and trying combinations for yourself.

as a few members of NBR pointed out, benchmarks are illegal to provide to "third parties", so as for now, refrain from posting synthetic benchmark scores and comment moreso on the games.

if you're going to post comments on games performance:

write a little detailed summary of what you experienced whether it be good or bad (temperatures and so forth). please include what hardware configuration as well as graphic drivers you're using.

if you're going to post about non-working games or gaming problems:

write adaquate detail on what problems you're experiencing (errors, blue screens, and so forth). please include what hardware configuration you're running as well as the graphic drivers.

also, if you can, post what other programs you know were running so we can have an idea of what programs might possibly interfere with performance.

if you're going to comment on drivers:

please post your hardware configuration and what drivers work good or bad (or don't install at all). give a little detailed description of your experience with the drivers.


hopefully we can pull together and provide Microsoft decent feedback.

*Note: you don't have to follow the guidelines too strictly, but try to post as much as you can about your hardware so we know what works with what configuration. also, you don't have to include every section of this thread in your comment .*

remember, should you come across problems, please submit them to Microsoft in order to help work out bugs and whatnot. if your computer throws an error, include that error to your report.

____________________________________________________________________


Below is the list of Games that work confirmed by myself and other users at NBR. If you have any comments on performance with certain hardware, please make note (for example, if your gpu's don't run certain games, please tell us so we can make note of it). *Next to game comments, i'm going to write down whatever the user's gpu is who makes the comment*:

Left 4 Dead

Call of Duty: World at War
-Runs better than it has in Vista (Via ATI HD 3200)

Counter-Strike 1.6

Crisis Warhead
-Many crashes, though frame rate is smoother than it was in XP (Via SLI 7950 GTX)

____________________________________________________________________

List of Games that do not, or are not working for some users. Do note, this does not mean it won't work on your hardware, though if you have the same setup, chances are you're probably in the same boat as others. i will remove games from this list provided someone says that their game runs:

Doom 3
-Game will not run on 64 bit (Via ATI 3870x2)


____________________________________________________________________

 

I'm using 64-bit 7. Hardware is in my sig.

All 64-bit Nvidia drivers seem to install with no problems, as does Nvidia System Tools. I've tried 179.28, 181.20, and 185.20.

Performance-wise, gaming is identical to what I had on 32-bit Premium. I see people talking about gaming being better on 7, but it's pretty much equal for me. Even my 3dmark06 scores are the same.

 

my 3dmark06 scores were about 400 higher with windows 7 64bit then it was with Vista Ultimate 64bit. Gateway P6831FX with x7800 /oc to 3GHZ, 4GB Ram, 64GB SSD hard drive, 179.28 drivers

 

I jumped from 10166 to 10633 going from 32-bit Vista to 32-bit W7.

 

that's quite an achievement.

my score went down about 2100 marks in 32 bit windows 7 (~6600 marks)

with the default nvidia drivers (179.28 i believe.. i'll check when i get home), my cards dropped much in 3dmark06 scores.

i noticed crysis ran a bit better, with around an average of 32 fps on mixed settings (shaders on high... pretty much the left side of the menu on high, and the right side on medium) at 1024 x 768 on the drivers listed above. i was able to receive better performance in windows xp, however, my frames don't jump around as much.

today i'm going to attempt to install new graphic drivers and benchmark again. i don't think windows 7 is really set well for an SLI rig in the beta just yet. anyone with other sli setups notice a large decrease in benchmarking?

my specs are listed below.

 

great thread guys, since i couldn't find any gaming-related benchies on the net. What about in-game performance? Btw, screw 3dmark!

 

Just so you guys know, it's against the Win7 EULA to benchmark the OS.

 

that quote should be in someone's sig. i'm selling copyrights to it for a buck a piece! pm me for a paypal transaction.

 

where is this stated?

 

The EULA you have to accept when you install the OS, usually at the end, MS have ALWAYS frowned upon having their BETA OS being benchmarked, and Win7 is no expection.

EDIT: Exact part

"You may not disclose the results of any benchmark tests of the software to any third party without Microsoft’s prior written approval."

 

This article states it, towards the bottom:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=624

 

Microsoft at its best...as usual
Let's all write to Microsoft!

 

we are not third party entities. i believe they're talking about companies...

though, i guess we can talk about gaming performance. that technically isn't benchmarking.

we can still talk about which games work under which drivers and whatnot.

 

yeah, my biggest question is, do all the games that work in Vista work in 7? I'm currently setting up 7 on my Tablet, so will try some, but curious on simple compatibility more so than minor performance differences.

 

So any game that runs on Win Vista works on Win 7?
and what about the drivers?
Does that work too as well as it is seen that gaming is at is best in Win 7 than Win Vista??
And after registering it online, does this Win7 demo expires?
Reply
Thanks

 

expires august 31

 

Any directX 11 game yet???

 

No, this is wrong. It expires on july 1st

 

Games with GameGuard don't work. Other than that I don't feel any difference in gaming, it feels the same as in Vista.

 

Call of Duty World at War runs as well or better than Vista, so happy so far with performance... this is going from Vista 32 to Windows 7 64, so maybe that was the difference, but no issues with it so far.

This is on the table with the ATI HD3200, ATI's preview drivers, and rest all Microsoft update drivers.

 

Any one running ageia physx on Win 7?

 

On XPS M1730?

 

Did have another question, would it be possible to share Steam games between two installs of Windows? As in, instead of having 2 separate steam installs and game files, could I put it on say it's own partition, and have both my Vista install and my Windows 7 install (each on their own partition) have access to the Steam install and games? Curious? Thanks...

 

August 1st.

 

We're not "third party" We are THE party!

 

Thanks for the post. Glad to see that it performs great under windows 7

 

you can install your steam games on any computer, so say if you have one large hard drive that is dual booting windows XP/Vista and Windows 7, you can redownload all of your steam games to your Windows 7 partition.

you will not be able to access your Windows XP/Vista games on steam if they're on the same hard drive, because they're installed on a different partition on that disk.

if you have two hard drives (like i do), you can install your OS on one drive, and your games and whatnot on the other drive. this allows me to install Steam on my secondary hard drive, and run Steam off both windows XP and windows 7 paritions without having to reinstall the game. the only thing you'll have to reinstall is some kind of registry file that will automatically be installed when you try to run steam, so your OS can access and run steam (it's automatic so you shouldn't have to worry about it).

if you have a secondary hard drive, don't make it bootable and don't install an OS on it, and you will be able to install programs on it and run it on multiple OS's.

 

Last time I was in a court room third party was any entity, which includes your dog and your mother together with everyone else but you.

That said I would post benchmarks from XP32, V64 Ult, Win7 Ult compared in the following games:

CoD4
CoD5
Crysis & Warhead
DMC4
WoW
FarCry 2
Fallout 3

(Yes, it was a pain to scrath up install everything, and the worst part is that I cannot disclosure the results to anyone else due to the EULA).

Da Commrade! The iron hand of the motherland shall surely crush the imperalistic, capitalistic pigs!

(This post may contain traces of sarcasm).

 

A guy on ZDNet talked about the EULA and made it clearer for me. From my stand point I thought that them making that part of the EULA was completely pointless, but after reading this it makes sense to me.

Posted By: Ed Bott

"Historically, the point of this sort of license agreement is to stop competitors from making claims about the product. This sort of clause used to be common in database products and may still be. The idea was to prevent the competition from claiming their product is faster than yours.

My guess is that this license provision would be much more defensible if the action were against a competitor."

 

my purpose was to figure out which cards using certain drivers running certain games worked well, and if there were problems, we would report them to Microsoft.

it was for the beta tester's benefits. it would lessen the trouble one would have to go through and figure out which combination of software and drivers worked the best.

 

Heres my experience with drivers and Win7:

None of the Dox drivers will work with Win7 for me. Nvidia's official Beta drivers seemed to make the game choppy, but I didn't lose any FPS (Weird, I know). I am now using 180.70 and I get about the same FPS as Vista x64 (Maybe 5-10 less) and it's running smooth. One problem I have had though is Win7 shows steam icon on the task bar as Counter strike source icon. The icon for steam is correct on the desktop, but when a steam chat opens a CSS icon is on the taskbar for it. Not a big deal, JW if anyone else had that issue.

3dMark 06 seems to be about the same as Vistax64 as well.

 

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx

"Watch the calendar. The Beta expires on August 1, 2009. To continue using your PC, please be prepared to reinstall a prior version of Windows or a subsequent release of Windows 7 before the expiration date."

The key may expire on July 31st, but W7 can still be used until August 1st.

 

Was gonna post this, but forgot where i saw it >.<

 

I have my key. But need DVD's.

WAHHH!!!!

 

only game i cant run in 7 is doom 3, because it hates 64 bit. also my 3dm06 score is 16107 @3.06ghz.

 

You can still post the fps that a game gives you while playing.
The eula is narrow enough to prohibit only "benchmark test" results.

 

i updated the original post with a list of games that do work and do not work (from what users have said). if you leave comments about games i'm going to put it up there as well.

 

uh, thanks.

 

Here's my experience with Win7 so far. First off I tried installing Turbo Tax. I know it's not a game but it was the first thing I tried and it did NOT work. After setting compatibility for either XP or Vista (I forget which) it installed and ran fine.

Next I tried to install Fallout 3. I installed no drivers other than Dox's lastest custom for Vista 64 and did just a straight install of them, no setting of compatibility mode as I read someone did. Anyway the problem occurred immediately when I stuck the DVD into the computer. The falloutlauncher would not run. I did eventually get it installed by running setup from the disk but even when it did install I still couldn't get it to run. Falloutlauncher errored out. Trying to run the game with a direct launching of fallout3 failed and I suspect because the falloutlauncher didn't setup my configuration settings.

That was the straw that broke the camels back so I went back to Vista. Gotta have my fallout 3...

 

I got Windows 7(32-bit) installed on my Gateway and Fallout 3, GRID, Crysis runs without any problems. Using 179.28 official drivers from Nvidia.
But, no performance gain in comparison to Vista.

 

GTA IV, Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Flight Simulator Acceleration, Mirrors Edge, Fallout 3, and Gears of War all run perfectly in 7 x64. I am not sure why I am seeing a significant performance boost compared to Vista x64, but some games are up to double the speed and benches are up 600-800 points (I don't give a crap about not advertising bench scores in win7!) I am waiting for my system back from sager to beat my bench records in my sig, but I think I'll be able to go far beyond them.

Just wanted to do some speculating here regarding Direct X 11.

Microsoft has stated that Direct X 11 will be supported by Vista, and is native to Win 7. This is a very good thing to hear. I believe DX 10 did not do so well because of the large amount of gamers running DX9 in WinXP, and the lack of support for DX10 in the WinXP env. With Vista pulling in an increasing market share, I have a hope that DX11 is going to be more successful, and that developers will develop solely for DX11, much like many do for DX9. When that is the case, we'll finally be able to see the advantages that the DX10, DX11 api's have always had to offer. If this is the case, a jump in gaming performance, along with dramatically increased graphical capabilities, can be expected soon after Win7 is launched.

 

Oh really, double the speed eh? If find that hard to believe. Care to back that up with some proof, some pics with a fraps overlay perhaps?

I've got no performance boost in Win 7 over Vista, mind you I use the 32bit version, and I'm not sure if I can install the 64 bit version on my Asus (in sig), I don't get any drop either though.

For me performance of GTA IV, Crysis Warhead and Crysis, Medal of Honor Airborne, CoD 4, and GTR Evo/Race 07 to name a few games I have is the same as Vista.

So still XP is the better OS for gaming imo, I get slightly better fps at the same settings and in a higher resolution in most cases in Vista in those games I mentioned above, apart from GTA IV which seems to have the same performance in Vista, XP or Win 7.

Perhaps Win 7 and Vista only give comparable performance or better to XP if you have a extreme dual/quad core CPU and a 9800/8800 nVidia card or similar GPU?

 

You'd definitely be able to install the 64 bir Windows 7 beta on your computer

 

Yeah I don't think I'll bother though, I haven't got any spare partitions now and I've been reading elsewhere on the web that there isn't much if any performance gain over a 32bit OS because games are not generally written for 64bit OSs.

 

I had no problems installing and running GTA San Andreas on W7, the very same machine I had it running on with Vista Home Basic (default settings).

Didn't notice any differences in gameplay, but neither Windows install had any more on it than the other.

Compaq V5000
Sempron 3300+ @ 2.0GHz
2GB DDR333
120GB 5400 HDD
X200M IGP

 

Anyone else having issues with Windows 7?

7 performs great, and I really like the new taskbar, however the NVIDIA drivers (WDDM 1.1 from WinUpdate) and NVIDIA drivers in vista compat mode (179.28) are both laggy when using Aero.

It's noticeable when resizing and minimizing.

does anyone have a workaround yet?

 

I've never had that issue. I allowed 7 to install the 167 ones and it worked the way its meant to be .

 

I have no issues with Nvidia drivers in 7. I installed 179.28 myself instead of using Windows Update, and I see no lag.

 

Well i shouldn't say its all-out lag, just the animations aren't as smooth as Vista was.

I'm on Win7 64b btw