- Joined
- Dec 5, 2005
- Location
- San Diego, California,
Hey everyone. With the advent of Windows 7 on the horizon I wanted to try and explore some claims about Windows 7 and the performance gains it might have to offer. When Microsoft released this little tidbit to various news sites I wanted to try and get some real information on which system was faster. Vista or Windows 7. Well after putting over 14 hours of work into this little project of mine I think it's time to post my results. Since there was no information I could find out I had to conduct some experiments of my own. These are the results.
Testing Objective and Methodology
The objective was to find out which was faster overall in gaming and a few non gaming benchmarks including my overall experience with each system. I made sure to adhere to strict guidelines and get the most consistent test results each time.
Each game was run with FRAPS at 180 second intervals 3 times in a row. After each game was tested I took the average fps and averaged them out. I also included a few synthetic tests just for the sake of it. Including PC Pitstop's Results of course.
I ran each game at the native resolution of 1440x900. Also each game excluding Crysis Warhead had 4X MSAA and 8X AF. I tested each game with the highest playable settings also.
Test Setup
Motherboard: Asus M3A78-T 790GX AM2+ Socket
CPU: AMD Phenom X4 920 at 3.06 GHZ
GPU: XFX 8800GTS 512 at stock clocks
RAM: 2 Gigs of OCZ SOE PC 5400 DDR Memory
PSU: Xclio Great Power Supply 550W
HDD: Seagate Barracua 7200RPM 160 Gig IDE Drive (Primary Drive Partitioned)
Maxtor 40 Gig IDE drive (Primary Purpose: Secondary Backup)
Seagate Barracuda 500 Gig SATA 32MB cache
Cooler: Gigabyte G Power Lite
Case: Antec Nine Hundred
Drivers: Vista: Xtreme G 185.81 Drivers
Windows Vista: Nvidia GeForce 190.38 BETA Drivers
Note: If you ask why I didn't test Windows 7 with the Xtreme G Drivers I was unsure if Xtreme G's Windows 7 drivers had the supposed enhancements for Windows 7's WDDM1.1 So I opted for the stock reference drivers.
Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Vs Windows 7 RC Performance Results
Synthetic Benchmarks
3DMark 06 Vista: 10812 Windows 7:10837
Super Pi: Vista: 22.754s Windows 7: 22.597s
PC Pitstop results: Vista: 9435 Windows 7: 9090 Vista Results Windows 7 Results
Gaming Benchmarks
Crysis Warhead: Vista: 28.58 fps Windows 7: 27.12 fps
Call of Duty World at War: Vista: 42.57 fps Windows 7: 51.74 fps
Team Fortress 2: Vista 113.094 Windows 7: 93.938
Note: TF2 was tested on a server with a max of 32 players. The maps used were Granary for Vista and Payload Race for Windows 7. So take this one with a grain of salt. Several repetitions of trying to reproduce a very consistent result proved difficult so I attempted to get as consistent as I could with this one.
Conclusions and Overall Personal Experience:
After several sleepless nights and tons of caffeine to try and get a conclusive result I finally finished.
Overall each system trades blows. Interestingly there was a few instances when Windows 7 was actually up to ten fps on average. I am still investigating this and will get back to you as soon as I can. Moving on though, Windows 7 has a new feel and is very snappy. But in terms of smoothness and responsiveness I prefer vista. Aesthetically Windows 7 is pleasing but the new task bar is something I am still coming to terms with. I am used to have the show desktop button on the left not upon the right. Not to mention I like to adjust the start menu to my specifications. My preference goes to Vista on this. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this little experiment of mine and hope that people enjoy what I have posted. Thanks.
Testing Objective and Methodology
The objective was to find out which was faster overall in gaming and a few non gaming benchmarks including my overall experience with each system. I made sure to adhere to strict guidelines and get the most consistent test results each time.
Each game was run with FRAPS at 180 second intervals 3 times in a row. After each game was tested I took the average fps and averaged them out. I also included a few synthetic tests just for the sake of it. Including PC Pitstop's Results of course.
I ran each game at the native resolution of 1440x900. Also each game excluding Crysis Warhead had 4X MSAA and 8X AF. I tested each game with the highest playable settings also.
Test Setup
Motherboard: Asus M3A78-T 790GX AM2+ Socket
CPU: AMD Phenom X4 920 at 3.06 GHZ
GPU: XFX 8800GTS 512 at stock clocks
RAM: 2 Gigs of OCZ SOE PC 5400 DDR Memory
PSU: Xclio Great Power Supply 550W
HDD: Seagate Barracua 7200RPM 160 Gig IDE Drive (Primary Drive Partitioned)
Maxtor 40 Gig IDE drive (Primary Purpose: Secondary Backup)
Seagate Barracuda 500 Gig SATA 32MB cache
Cooler: Gigabyte G Power Lite
Case: Antec Nine Hundred
Drivers: Vista: Xtreme G 185.81 Drivers
Windows Vista: Nvidia GeForce 190.38 BETA Drivers
Note: If you ask why I didn't test Windows 7 with the Xtreme G Drivers I was unsure if Xtreme G's Windows 7 drivers had the supposed enhancements for Windows 7's WDDM1.1 So I opted for the stock reference drivers.
Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Vs Windows 7 RC Performance Results
Synthetic Benchmarks
3DMark 06 Vista: 10812 Windows 7:10837
Super Pi: Vista: 22.754s Windows 7: 22.597s
PC Pitstop results: Vista: 9435 Windows 7: 9090 Vista Results Windows 7 Results
Gaming Benchmarks
Crysis Warhead: Vista: 28.58 fps Windows 7: 27.12 fps
Call of Duty World at War: Vista: 42.57 fps Windows 7: 51.74 fps
Team Fortress 2: Vista 113.094 Windows 7: 93.938
Note: TF2 was tested on a server with a max of 32 players. The maps used were Granary for Vista and Payload Race for Windows 7. So take this one with a grain of salt. Several repetitions of trying to reproduce a very consistent result proved difficult so I attempted to get as consistent as I could with this one.
Conclusions and Overall Personal Experience:
After several sleepless nights and tons of caffeine to try and get a conclusive result I finally finished.
Overall each system trades blows. Interestingly there was a few instances when Windows 7 was actually up to ten fps on average. I am still investigating this and will get back to you as soon as I can. Moving on though, Windows 7 has a new feel and is very snappy. But in terms of smoothness and responsiveness I prefer vista. Aesthetically Windows 7 is pleasing but the new task bar is something I am still coming to terms with. I am used to have the show desktop button on the left not upon the right. Not to mention I like to adjust the start menu to my specifications. My preference goes to Vista on this. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this little experiment of mine and hope that people enjoy what I have posted. Thanks.
