Windows 7: Gamers and enthusiasts

Posted on 15 Jul 2009 at 15:39

Vista felt sluggish, bloated and slovenly, but has Microsoft made Windows any faster for those who crave the ultimate in performance from their PC?

Many have lauded Windows 7 for feeling much quicker than Vista. From snappy boot times, to judder-free Aero Glass effects, to responsive applications, the new operating system has impressed right from the first pre-beta. But does that feel-good effect translate into measurable performance gains?

To deliver the definitive verdict on Windows 7's performance, we've turned to our suite of application benchmarks and tested across Windows XP, Vista, and both the beta and Release Candidate versions of Windows 7. We've also used the same system across all of our tests - a Core i7 920 rig with 3GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon HD 4550 graphics card - to ensure a level playing field.

A clean install of the Windows 7 Release Candidate scored 1.54 in our benchmarks, compared to 1.8 from a freshly-installed Vista system, and 2.1 from a fully-updated version of Windows XP - although it's worth bearing in mind that our audio encoding tests aren't directly comparable between XP and the other operating systems on test. It's also worth following Microsoft's advice and using a clean installation of Windows 7 RC rather than an upgrade: our system, when upgraded from Vista to Windows 7, scored a mere 1.3.

On the face of it our results are a pretty damning indictment of Windows 7's performance. But closer inspection of individual benchmark scores reveal that most of our application tests were virtually as quick in Windows 7 as they were in Vista: the 2D graphics test saw Vista scoring 1.95 and Windows 7 outpacing it with a 1.98, with the encoding benchmark returning a similarly close result.

Further analysis of the scores (the full extent of which can be explored on the PC Pro blog revealed that the slower Office and multitasking results are caused by an issue between Windows 7 and Microsoft PowerPoint. The root of the problem lies within the new Windows Display Driver Model 1.1. The old model duplicated its memory demands across the GPU and system memory, whereas Windows 7 relies solely on the GPU. This means, according to Microsoft's Engineering Windows 7 blog, that the "CPU now has to read data back from the video memory", rather than having it easily accessible in the system's RAM.

The result is a slower benchmark score in PowerPoint, which, accordingly, drags down the Office and multitasking scores when compared to Vista, which uses WDDM 1. In real-world use, this problem will only be manifested in the occasional slide taking a second longer to render. It's really only those using demanding CAD and modelling software that could, conceivably, see performance suffer.

Microsoft has been working hard to improve boot times in Windows 7

Microsoft has been working hard to improve boot times in Windows 7. Microsoft identified that only 35% of Vista systems booted in 30 seconds or less, and 75% in 50 seconds or less - a statistic that Microsoft deemed unacceptable. To reduce this, Microsoft has been trying to streamline the number of system services the PC ploughs through when booting, as well as enabling the parallelisation of driver activation, rather than queuing them all up to be enabled one-by-one.

Our tests measured the time it took for the PC to arrive at a usable desktop, although none of our systems broke the 30-second barrier: XP took longer than a minute, with Vista taking 49.3 seconds and Windows 7 reducing this to 47.2 seconds. It's an improvement, if not exactly ground-breaking.