Problems getting decent gaming speed out of Windows 7.

I've been using Windows XP since 2001, and it's always been good to me and my gaming needs. Just yesterday I was looking at a bunch of benchmarks between XP and Win7, and it showed most games to run par if not only a few frames slower than XP.

I get a free copy of Win7 Pro from MSDNAA, so I figured why not try it out. I installed it and got all my drivers from their respective sites, and tried playing a few games like Street Fighter 4 and Resident Evil 5.

Street Fighter 4 would run at maxed settings easily on XP, but on Win7 I had to turn the AA and texture filtering off to be able to get it to run at 60 fps. It would still slowdown to around 30-40fps whenever it does a close in shot of one of the characters faces.

I had similar experiences with Resident Evil 5. On XP I can run the game at max settings and not have a single slowdown through the entire game, but when I run it on Win7 with AA on it would only run at around 20fps, and with it off it would run at around 40fps.

I would love to be able to switch to Windows 7, but I can't if it means my games will be running that much slower than they do on XP. I've been looking forward to Shattered Horison which is going to be only DX10.

I'm wondering, is there anything people have been doing to get performance on Win7 the same as on XP?

I've been running the 64bit version of Windows 7, would using the 32bit version get me more efficency on 32 bit games?

Specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 O.C. to 3.5 ghz
Nvidia GTX 260 clocks at 675/1200/1450
4GB Ram

 

WinXP runs only dx9 graphics engine, while Vista and Win7 will use dx10 graphics engine.

It may be possible to force dx9 on with commandline switches or similar. Game specific forums (or even manual) probably contain such info already.

I have no personal experience with those games you mention but I've seen this happen before when Vista came out couple years ago.

 

No. Now, Vista and 7 uses DirectX 11 already.
However, DX11 Supported GPUs are very less currently.
So, basically, GPUs without DX11 would not able to use the abilities of DX11 perfectly(only improve slightly).
XP, is very old already. My opinion is get rid of it.

 

I know which versions of DX are supported by XP/Vista/7, and I definitly like the new features offered by Windows 7, that's why I would like to switch to Windows 7 on my gaming machine. Sending files over a network is around 5x faster on Windows 7.

But I'm wondering how all the benchmarks I find online show that Windows 7 is running DX9 games just as fast as they were running on XP. I've had much higher performance hits when I switched to Windows 7. The only other difference between the installations is that I'm using Windows 7 64bit, and that my XP installation was 32bit.

The only thing keeping me from switching to Seven is the performance issues that I've stated in my initial post. I'm just wondering if this has been happening for other people or is there something I'm messing up with the installation to get games running efficiently.

 

"XP, is very old already. My opinion is get rid of it"
why? he (and me before) says it runs faster for the games he plays.
dual boot, horses for courses.

 

Yep, dual booting ended up being the solution I'm currently going with. I use my XP installation for games and Seven for about everything else. If I want to move a 4gb file from one computer to another I just switch to Seven, then switch back to XP once I'm done.

 

What drivers are you using? Just a switch to W7 shouldn't cause that dropoff, and 64-bit should help some games.

 

That's what I was thinking. Drivers can obviously make big difference.

 

Have you tried disabling all of the eye candy that comes with Win7/Vista such as aero as well as all of the indexing options?

Much of the visual and under the hood goodies in Win7/Vista come at a price in terms of CPU and memory usage.

 

I was using 185.81 Xtreme G drivers for both installations.

I wen't into system settings and tell it to "Adjust for best performance". And I also turned off Microsoft Defender, but that was the extent of what I tried to turn off in Windows 7. Switching to classic view helps quite a bit on getting some fps in the game, but turning off everything else and Defender didn't make any noticable difference.

If there are more functions that I can turn off to make it faster I'd be happy to try them. I wouldn't mind if Windows 7 looked and acted exactly like XP except for the DirectX 10 and 64bit functionality.

 

Aero offloads much of the graphics needs of the OS to the GPU, instead of the CPU having to handle it. The windowing system resource needs are not particularly extravagant when Aero is on. Any decent modern gaming rig will have enough RAM and CPU that the mere needs of the GUI won't interfere with it.

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/windows_vista_aero_glass_performance/page3.asp

Even back in the barely RTM days, when drivers weren't mature, Aero barely impacted any moderately powered system (by 2006 standards):

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=107