WEI Decreasing Over Time?

I've had my HP HDX16t since October. When I first got it my WEI was 5.1 (Aero graphics score was and is the lowest).

Then it dropped to 5.0. Now it is 4.8. Rolling back to original HP approved display driver does not make it go back up to original score. I'm currently running the latest, 2nd release, HP supported video driver.

Anyone know what governs the Aero graphics performance score?

All other scores have remained the same since new, except Memory that went up after going from 2 to 4gig RAM.

 

Don't worry about it too much, the WEI doesn't really mean anything.

 

My WEI seems to be increasing over time. Why just the other day I hit a 6.

Who knows? By next year, it'll probably be a 9. (if I feel like it of course)

 

I know, but I'm curious as to what is causing it to decrease. If an improved video card would make it go up, then I am wondering if I have changed a setting that has caused it to go down.

Really not sure but it seems as though it now takes longer for my desktop to generate the sidebar and icons at boot. Don't know if this is related or not.

 

Capella, try this:

Go to C:\Windows\Performance\WinSAT

Then open the folder Datastore, and delete all the files in that folder, then run, WEI.

See if that works.

 

I had done that. The lower score came up again. Seems like I must have altered something that has reduced my graphics performance but have not a clue what it was.

Is is possible that reduced shared system memory would cause this?

 

Didn't MS say that they would upgrade the WEI to reflect the hardware evolution? Like if a quad hd4870x2 was getting 9 in 2007 it would only get 5 or 6 in 2012.

 

More likely than not, it's as Ayle says - since WEI can only have a maximum score of 5.9, as improved components continue to appear in the marketplace, the scores achievable by older components must necessarily be forced to drop, otherwise within a few years, every system around would have nothing but 5.9 scores, which would just make the truth blatantly obvious (as opposed to merely obvious, like it is now ) - WEI is meaningless.

 

But, does it go up to eleven?

 

Instead of looking @ WEI score i suggest you look at " Performance and Reliability Monitor" that should give the real performance and stability ratings of your system

 

WEI means nothing. Mine can all be at 0 for all I care.

 

http://unlockforus.blogspot.com/2007/10/fun-stuff-hack-your-windows-experience.html

(dont tell anyone, we dont want everyone cheating their WEI scores)

 

Well, I just got my Graphics score up from 4.8 to 5.9 without cheating.

I did it by overclocking my graphics card with Rivatuner 2.2.

So I gues WEI is based upon actual performance tests of your hardware, and not just some arbitrary floating scale.

Question is, why did my graphics performance decrease over time? It would seem that something actually slowed my system settings.

My base score is now up to 5.4 (HD performance is now the lowest).

 

I have it at 9.96

 

The inferences you're drawing from the results of your overclocking are not correct; even though, as you've demonstrated, WEI does in fact take actual performance into account, it is still entirely possible that the yardstick used to measure the WEI-ness of that performance has changed.

To illustrate, suppose that we were ranking children on their height in grade school, and decided to give each of them a WEI number based on what each child's actual height was relative to, say, the mean height for all children in the same class. Thus, we will give each child a numeric rank having the form x.yz that represents the child's height as a percentage of the mean height, expressed in decimal form (i.e., so that 10% is expressed as 0.10).

Let's say that, the first year we do this, we have one student in Grade 2, Charlie, who is 46 inches (approx. 117 cm), and let's say that the mean height of all children in Grade 2 is 45.4 inches (approx. 115.32 cm). Charlie therefore gets a WEI rank of 1.01 because his height is 101% of the mean (a more precise value is 1.01321586%, but the definition of the ranking system stops with two decimal places).

Now, let's say that Charlie grows an additional 2 inches during the first year; thus, in the second year, when he is in Grade 3, Charlie will be 48 inches (approx. 122 cm) tall. However, let's also posit that, on average, all of the children who were in Grade 2 with Charlie actually grew 4 inches during the first year (i.e., the mean child added 4 inches to her/his height). Thus, during the second year, when Charlie is in Grade 3, the mean height of all children in Grade 3 is now 48.4 inches (approx. 122.94 cm).

As a result, even though Charlie has actually continued to grow, he now gets a WEI ranking of only 0.99 (more precisely, 0.9917355372) because his height is now only 99% of the mean height of all children in Grade 3.

However, to mimic your overclocking, suppose that Charlie's parents, fearful for their son's delicate ego, secretly get a pair of disguised platform shoes made for him that add an additional 1 inch to his apparent height (and further suppose that we're lax enough in our benchmarking that we measure all of the children with shoes on, instead of doing it properly by measuring them in their bare feet).

Because of the disguised platform shoes, Charlie now has an apparent height of 49 inches (approx. 124 cm), which gives him a WEI ranking for Grade 3 of 1.01 (more precisely, 1.0123967), thus making it appear as if Charlie has continued to grow at the mean rate for all of the children in his grade.

Of course, if we wanted to go one better, and assumed that the disguised platform shoes added 2 inches to his height, making him appear to be 50 inches (approx. 127 cm) tall, he would end up with a WEI ranking of 1.03 (more precisely, 1.03305785124), and would thus appear to have outperformed his classmates in terms of his growth performance.

While this is a bit of a silly illustrative example, what it does demonstrate is that, if the benchmark being used to rate samples against each other is adjusted, that can have the effect of making it appear to be the case that a particular sample has declined in the measured category, even though it in fact has not.

Thus, we can replicate your actual WEI scores, both with and without overclocking, if we simply assume that your system has continued to perform exactly as it always has, but that Microsoft has tweaked the benchmarks used to derive the WEI score so that each unit of performance now earns slightly fewer WEI points today than it did last year.

For example, assume that when _Vista was released, the CPU's performance WEI score was computed by multiplying the CPU's maximum clock speed in GHz measured during the evaluation period by 3, and simply reducing any scores above 5.9 to 5.9. If one then used WEI to evaluate a computer with a CPU that had a maximum tested clock speed of 2.2GHz, that would result in a score of 6.6, which would be truncated to 5.9.

Now, assume that when Microsoft released _Vista SP1, they re-weighted the factors used in WEI so that the CPU's max. measured clock speed in GHz is now multiplied by 2.5 instead of 3. When we evaluate that same computer, and assuming that the CPU can still make it up to 2.2GHz, we will now only get a WEI score for that CPU of 5.5, which has the effect of making it look like the CPU's performance capabilities are deteriorating, even though we know they're not because we stipulated that performance was still the same.

Why would Microsoft do something like that? Ultimately, that's up to them; however, one guess that comes to mind is that, whatever factors were being used to measure WEI scores must have been becoming increasingly irrelevant if more and more systems were achieving actual, non-truncated scores in excess of 5.9, so that those factors had to be rescaled in order to make sure that fewer systems were actually achieving scores in excess of the 5.9 cut-off.

 

As expected of course. Question is, at what point did an update that I'm not aware of change the mean?

Does not matter of course, just curious.

As to why MS would do this, I think at least two reasons. One, as you pointed out, as technology improves more systems are capable of performing in excess of the mean. Two, it suggests to users that their systems are becoming out dated - a marketing ploy.

That aside, the WEI is supposed to relate to system capabilities and adjust Vista to suit the system it is being run on. Why then would you degrade the mean over time when at first it is theoretically capable of running Vista and apps to their fullest and then later not so much.

Using platform shoes is like manually placing a higher score in the WEI file, cheating of course, whereas overclocking is actually increasing system performance.

All in fun.

 

Since the WEI scale has an arbitrary cut-off of 5.9, and there is very little range for available values between 0 and 5.9, the unit used to measure performance must be adjusted as time goes on; otherwise, in a year or two, every new system will simply be pegged at 5.9 on all components and the WEI scale will effectively be useless - think of it as the silicon equivalent of grade inflation.

Another reason why your WEI score might slowly drop over the course of a long period of time could be the slow build-up of "detritus" - temp files, leftovers from uninstalled apps, fragmented files, etc - that the system has to deal with while it runs. A simple way of testing this would be to format your hdd and do a fresh installation; of course, that does entail certain downsides, too.