As you may already know – Windows 7 ships with DirectX 11 – testing that part of the OS is a little hard right now as not one manufacturer is shipping any DirectX 11 hardware. So this performance guide is based on Windows 7 RTM and an nVidia GTX 295 with the latest 190.38 WHQL Forceware drivers and on an i7 920 overclocked to 3.8ghz. All games were played in 1920x1200 resolution with every title running on its highest settings. You may have read older previews of Windows 7 talking about the gaming side of things not being up to even the standard of Vista – well that’s why no one should post comments like that until they have the final version because I am pleased to say that Windows 7 runs games very slightly better than Vista does both in frames per second and in some cases – loading times. I have tried the following titles on both Vista SP2 and Windows 7 RTM and here are my views on each title: Crysis Warhead: In Windows 7 the game actually manages to pump out 2 fps more than it does over Windows Vista SP2 – this is running the game in DirectX 10 – 64bit mode. While this may not sound much, it is a good sign especially as the nVidia drivers for Windows 7 probably still have even more tweaking to come before the October release of the Operating system.

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Loading times were also improved by just over 3 seconds compared to Vista. Age of Conan: This was tested in DirectX 9 mode as DirectX 10 in Age of Conan suffers performance problems across the board and doesn’t even support nVidia SLI properly.

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In DX 9 on Windows 7 once again we saw a slight frame rate increase compared to vista – this time it was 4 frames a second faster with a more consistent frame rate throughout the game too. Battlestations: Pacific: This is a DirectX 9 Game for Windows Live! – Performance on this was slightly lower in Windows 7 over vista by little more than 1 frame per second but again loading times were improved on Windows 7 by 4 seconds. Far Cry 2: Tested in DirectX 10 it registered 3 frames a second more in Windows 7 than Windows Vista and loading was once more improved. There were some crashing issues, but these seem to be down to the game itself as I noticed some in Windows vista as well.

Stalker: Clear Sky: This was tested in DirectX 10 and there was a very small performance hit on Windows 7 – yes so small it hardly registered – 0.3 frames per second When playing the game you don’t notice what so ever and again loading time was improved by a few seconds. 64 Bit Performance and Comments If you have a 64-bit machine there is no reason what so ever why you shouldn’t be running Windows 7 64-bit for gaming.

People still for some reason believe that driver performance isn’t up to standard, but that is a thing of the past – heck even Vista 64-bit has very good performance in 64-bit gaming and across the desktop. The reason that 64-bit is so much better for gaming is that you get full access to all the memory, my test system I’m using 6GB of DDR 3 and it makes a difference not just to the operating system, but also to the gaming benchmarks adding 3 or 4 frames to most 64-bit titles.