Windows 7 Gaming Performance Tested 179
Timmus writes "Gamers holding onto Windows XP may not have to fear sluggish performance when Windows 7 debuts. While Windows Vista's gaming performance was pretty spotty at launch, the Windows 7 beta build seems to handle most games well. Firingsquad has tested the Windows 7 beta against Windows XP SP3 and Vista SP1 on midrange and high-end gaming PCs across 7 different games. While the beta stumbles in a couple of cases, overall it performs within a few percentage points of Windows XP, actually outrunning XP in multiple benchmarks."
Still the same story, mostly. (Score:5, Interesting)
Their benchmarks hardly show a conclusive improvement for Windows 7. Vista mostly beats it in DX10, and XP still beats it about half the other benchmarks. It *does* manage to beat Vista in DX9... hardly exciting, but something.
Their mid-range also seems a bit ambitious - more like mid-range of new hardware for serious gamers, which means high-end for the rest of us.
The most interesting paragraph for me:
"because Windows 7 felt more ready to go once the desktop loaded up. Both XP and Vista took at least an extra minute after the desktop loaded to be ready to run applications, while Windows 7 ran Firefox without stuttering or hesitation. "
Now thats something worthwhile. The 2 seconds of "boot time" is irrelevant, being able to use the desktop immediately is a real improvement.
Re:Still the same story, mostly. (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't show an improvement at all.
In most of the tests, even Vista is faster, and in the few where Windows 7 wins, it's by so little it could be within the margin of error of the tests. As the article says, the differences are most likely driver related rather than intrinsic to the OS.
And the reason they're so close is that Windows 7 IS Vista with a few tweaks and a hell of a lot better marketing.
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Also note that this is a beta against RTM releases.
It could play a role.
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No Wine? (Score:3, Interesting)
Disappointing that they did not test performance on Linux with Wine or Crossover Games. Not every game will run on that but for those that do, the performance comparison could be very interesting. They could also test the performance of the games under ReactOS [reactos.org]. Comparing several releases all from the same company, always from the same one company, gets boring after a while.
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Well, I like Linux and all, but when it comes to gaming articles published on a big gaming site, posting Linux benchmarks would be a bit like comparing a train's performance on Russian versus European rail grades, interesting but kind of pointless.
I know a lot of people are holding on to Windows software for gaming (like myself, I would switch if it was easy to run all my games) and Linux has potential, but game publishers just aren't interested in such a financially insignificant market. They are the ones
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Just my $0.02
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Thanks for the link. The pixel shader test runs like a dog under Linux, but apart from that the results are pretty respectable. Linux plus Wine is about half the speed of Windows or better. Video cards double in speed every couple of years, so if this means being able to run games from 2007 and earlier I'd be quite happy. Anyway, for the cost of a Windows licence you could buy a better video card that would partly or wholly compensate for the reduced performance under Wine. I know which I'd rather spen
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"because Windows 7 felt more ready to go once the desktop loaded up. Both XP and Vista took at least an extra minute after the desktop loaded to be ready to run applications, while Windows 7 ran Firefox without stuttering or hesitation. "
That's a bit weird. My PC with a 14-month-old XP SP2 install is running applications perfectly less than five seconds after I log in.
My old P4 with a six-year-old install took maybe 5-10 seconds at a high estimate, with a total boot time of less than 25 seconds. What have they got on this thing that it takes such an incredibly long time? A minute is something I might expect out on a crap laptop running Vista. For XP on a modern desktop it's crazy.
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I don't think the GP meant high-end modules are always a ripoff. I think he meant it in the context of this system build. Those modules have their place, but a sub-$400 system is not it.
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They're using CL4 DDR2 memory - hardly top of the line. This stuff is like $25 after rebate from Newegg if I remember correctly (I ended up going with much more expensive DDR3 because the Mobo I wanted used DDR3 and getting CAS latencies down to 7 or lower for comparable overall speed to DDR2 meant paying an extra $40). Looking at CAS latencies, that is about in line with other RAM at the same price. Some of them like Kingston Extreme don't require a rebate and were about the same price.
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Printable version (Score:5, Informative)
One page, no adds.
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If they want to put up a picture of a product, or link google adwords, then fine. When they have obnoxious Flash animations which beep or whoop when you mouse-over them, or gifs which flash in psychadelic colours at tonic-clonic-seizure inducing speeds, I get a little irritated and subvert the system.
They'll learn one way or another.
N.B. The proxy I connect through blocks adverts by default anyway, but there are many who don't.
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64bit or 32bit? (Score:5, Interesting)
the story doesn't mention, but this is key.
first, they compare a 32bit xp to a 64bit vista; oranges to grapefruits.
next, they add windows 7 and don't mention if it's 32 or 64.
they did a decent job of being objective... but still fell short of offering us the information that we need. does 7 implement 32 and 64bit functionalities as smoothly as vista64? is it the kind of angry child that 64bit xp is?
bad grammar aside, this review is lacking some fundamental information that should have been disclosed on the first page.
Re:64bit or 32bit? (Score:4, Informative)
Keep in mind that XP x64 is not actually XP, but Win2003 x64 with some changes to make it look and feel like XP.
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Yep, exact same kernel and everything. On XP x64, I hear there's even a properties page somewhere that still says "Windows 2003 Server x64" (maybe it was even the sidebar of the start menu).
I wouldn't know firsthand, since I actually run Windows 2003 Server x64 on my laptop.
http://www.osnews.com/story/3655 [osnews.com]
It's OK, but I should disable the comment I'm forced to write for the log every time I want to shutdown or reboot.
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Some software detects it as w2k3 server atleast.
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Don't think so, as Server 2003 and XP x64 are still yet to get XP x86's 3rd service pack.
Their release version was roughly XP SP1, their SP1 was roughly XP's SP2, and they've had a random SP2 since which ISN'T XP's SP3. They're still separate.
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Most people don't realize this but 64bit is slower then 32 bit. Every instruction is twice as long, Executables are larger, and more IO back and forth from CPU to memory.
This isn't realized because of the speed improvement from 16bit to 32bit computers back in the late 80's/early 90's. Because by then most 16bit Systems built and sold had Maximum Ram 640k already installed, and actually stalled development of systems with more Ram for a while. When the 32bit systems came out they had 1 Megabyte. Which was
Re:64bit or 32bit? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your FSB is fast enough to deal. The pipeline in your CPU works on bigger chunks anyway. Heck, thats why vector processors were invented, MMX, SSE, etc - registers weren't wide enough. Executable size is insignificant, and instructions are varying length anyway (opcodes don't suddenly become 64bit on x64).
Theres almost a thousand threads on my current box. I'd say thats taking advantage of both cores. Apart from algorithms that flat out don't parellelize (eg MD5ing a bunch of data) it seems to be going pretty good here...
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Interesting theory.
It doesn't seem to be borne out by benchmarks [phoronix.com] though, at least for Linux.
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Of course, they aren't twice as slow. (i.e. They don't run at half the speed, for the pedants.)
The slowdown is a few percent, because most applications aren't bound by memory speed of instruction fetching.
But who really cares if the OS is a few percent slower? It uses ~0% of my cpu anyway. Most applications I run are still 32-bit, even though my OS is XP x64.
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I've done some quick benchmarks on identical hardware using PerformanceTest.
Yeah, 64-bit executables are a bit bigger than 32-bit executables, so they take marginally longer to load from the disk. That's probably why you're confused.
But looking at the benchmarks, integer operations are much faster (2-3x), floating point and memory operations are a bit faster (10-20%), and disk access is marginally faster (5%-10%). There was no difference on memory writes for some reason.
There was no difference on 2D or 3D
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The "64 is slower than 32" argument works for every single (32/64-bit) CPU architecture out there... Except the one most relevant to this article.
The 64-bit extension to "x86" (wether you call it x86-64, x64, AMD64, EM64T, or Intel64,) doubles the number of registers, as well as implementing a brand-new, mandatory FP unit. Therefore, "generic" 64-bit code on x64 will run better than "generic" 32-bit code on the same processor. By a measured increase of 10-15% in most benchmarks. Because Windows is compl
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Second, even if your workload consists of apps that are purely single threaded, you still benefit from two cores by letting your workload run on one core, and everything else on the second.
The single biggest thing I noticed when I built my first dual core computer over my older single core one. Didn't even notice the graphics improvement that much.
As a result, I'm unlikely to ever go back to single core. I figure quad core will be my next upgrade; but I bought a dual for the time because metrics had dual > quad > single for the price of the CPU for users of mostly single threaded applications, even many multi-threaded ones. The simple reason was that, for the price, quads took a good
Well, not always (Score:2)
While it is true that a 32-bit app usually runs a bit slower on a 64-bit system than a 32-bit system (we are talking a few percent) I think it is as much or more to do with the small amount of overhead the Windows on Windows emulation incurs rather than larger words. The FSB has plenty of bandwidth for that.
However what you discover is that when apps are recompiled to 64-bit, they are often faster, even if they shouldn't be. Prime95 found that. The program is all FP calculations and is done using SSE2 instr
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If you say so. Comparing 32 and 64 bit XP, 32 bit game benchmarks are near identical on my system, well within margin of error. 64 bit capable games, such has HL2, have a notable increase in speed beyond the margin of error. The reason is several fold.
"Every instruction is twice as long." Nope, opcodes and their paramters have always been variable length. In x86, they aren't always exactly 4 bytes. In x64 they aren't 8 bytes long, either! In x86, you'd have a function call CALL DWORD PTR [ADDRESS]
doesnt matter (Score:2, Insightful)
Running Vista64 since day one, and Windows 7 for a while, I must say internally both systems look similiar. Some article TL to quote stated that Seven is to Vista like 98SE was to 98. It does not take a rocket scientist to guess MSFT would never release such a dud like XP64 again - it's been overdone (can you say that?) by now.
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XP 64 ain't a dud, it's a necessity of life for some of us who actually wants newer than 3yr old hardware, and take advantage of the hardware.
The maximum limit of ram is 3-3.5Gb on 32Bit .... And i'm maxing 4Gb daily on REGULAR web dev utilization.
Never mind all apps sucking more and more each year. Firefox takes EASILY 250megs of the pie.
Think of: Firefox, Chrome, IE, Eclipse (or Zend Studio), WinSCP, 5 instances of Putty, Messenger, Outlook, Excel, F-Secure (And some other bg apps) all running at the same
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The whole article/title just reeks of wrongness and is too early to test.
Testing games on a beta for performance?
First off any real online PC Gamer who hasn't done it already has found out that Punkbuster doesn't exactly work online for Win7 without tricking the Services options. Not news since this was the story on Vista, only story is the customers demanding the developers to get some drivers and compatibility.
The drivers aren't exactly out or have not been polished, so you will still have some performanc
Misleading summary (Score:2)
and Windows XP out runs windows 7 and Vista in other benchmarks too..
7 year wait for "a few percentage points". Pfft (Score:2, Insightful)
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It can mean a lot of things:
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In a game the OS doesn't do very much, it's all game code vs. graphics drivers.
All the OS is doing is basic housework like reading the keyboard and mouse.
Sound is a tiny percentage of CPU power these days and is probably mooted by a multicore CPU.
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Yes. Since a game is almost the canonical exclusive mode task, the OS should add as little overhead as possible, with as many cycles as possible going the the CPU and GPU.
If one version of Windows had a lot higher performance than another for gaming, that'd be more suggestive of a bug or driver issues in the slower version.
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I run Win 7 on a laptop I have with 1.0/512. It works just fine. I didn't bother to benchmark anything, but a clean install of Win7 booted faster and was more responsive than a clean install of XP on the same machine, as far as I could tell
Of course, this is just my personal experience. I'm sure someone else will have another story to tell.
EDITORS: EDIT! (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, FFS can we stop linking to the BULLSHIT 16 paragraph=16 page articles that are meant to maximize web traffic? PLEASE?
Jesus, please: just copy the damn printable link and get it all on one page.
Slashdot is a fairly heavy-traffic site. You have the throw weight discourage this HORRIBLE style of web page design.
If the print-summary page isn't available then link the CONCLUSIONS page...readers who are smart enough to parse what WinMark scores are can *probably* figure out how to get back to the detail pages.
Here's the damn link: http://www.firingsquad.com/print_article.asp?current_section=Hardware&fs_article_id=2404 [firingsquad.com]
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How dare anybody be rewarded for their hard work, which i really want to read.
Maybe you go into work everyday and don't expect to get paid, but some people like getting money.
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Haha, look at this 'sperging nerd.
I'm looking at you, but it's not very amusing...
Waste of time. (Score:5, Interesting)
8 years. 8 bloody years. 8 YEARS. EIGHT... YEARS. Say it to yourself.
What the bloody hell has MS been doing for the last EIGHT YEARS? XP *still* outperforms their only other two Microsoft offerings in the market since its release. In the eight years BEFORE XP, we start with MS DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 (remember those days?), go through Windows 95, 98, most decent versions of NT and then Windows 2000. From them to XP... spot the difference. Now jump forward eight years instead and look at the difference, eight years on from XP and what have we got? Next to nothing. Oh, a couple of XP Service Packs that made more difference than every *OS* they've released since.
I looked at every graph on the page and they are all within a reasonable margin of error, especially in the absence of certain details (i.e. are the drivers all optimised for XP, Vista and Windows 7 equally? Was Windows 7 running 32- or 64-bit? etc.). There's nothing there that'll make gamer's go "OOHhh... gotta have that". It's more like "Well, if I do get lumped with Windows 7, hopefully it won't be much worse than my existing, well-configured, XP install".
What the hell have they been doing? I've argued before that there are no significant, new features in Vista and/or Windows 7, a myriad of problems still exist with both (and with XP for that matter), the minimum hardware is increasing all the time just to do the same tasks and there's no performance improvement at all (in fact, with Vista, it's quite likely to be the opposite depending on your uses/hardware). They haven't even bothered to comply with most of the legal demands on them in that time. They sort-of-but-not-quite started documenting SMB/CIFS, which hardly kills your current development teams. Is the code for Windows *really* that bad that this is all they could manage?
Alpha, beta, fine - I expect it to be flaky. In fact, I expect all sorts of debugging code and slagging the disk to death while it churns through buckets of debugging data so they can actually fix real-world problems. However, it builds on Vista drivers which, despite much fuss, are pretty well established now. It performs *identically* to Vista in a lot of tests (which suggests that not much at all has changed under the hood, as does the fact that Vista drivers are still compatible). The new features are basically plug-ins to the existing systems, not massive rewrites of critical code. This all leads me to believe that Windows 7 is a Vista Service Pack, to all intents and purposes. So what the hell were they working on for those 8 years of development with one of the largest software development teams in the world?
Slashdot: doomed to repeat history, endlessly. (Score:2, Interesting)
The general sentiment and tone of your comment is exactly the same of when XP was getting ready to come out. Everyone at Slashdot swore left and right that XP was bloated to hell, that it'd run too slow, and nobody would buy it, and it would signal the downfall of Microsoft. The interface so horrible that Joe Sixpack was finally going to wake up and switch to Linux. If not the interface, then product activation would. No, Win2k was their last great OS, and it can't possibly get any better than that.
And, her
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"The general sentiment and tone of your comment is exactly the same of when XP was getting ready to come out."
Not for me. 2000/XP was a quantum leap. I didn't think it was a good one at the time (mainly because of system requirements) but it changed an awful lot. And it did it in such a way that it was soon on every computer. That happened in a handful of years too. I'm not so sure I could have said that the jump itself from 2000 to XP was so massive - I still get people who bring me laptops with 2000
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Because... XP-> Vista is hardly a leap at all, it hardly compares to some of the minor 9x updates that occurred, but because it was parts of the GUI that changed, people think that's somehow more miraculous. There was also significant breakage for very little reward. Suddenly, everything needed new drivers to be rewritten, which often meant new hardware, or unsupported configurations.
Read this paragraph to yourself again. XP>Vista is hardly a leap at all... except for an entirely new (and better) dri
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So I've got to download, install and test new drivers to make all the hardware that always used to work continue to work, in the process obsoleting quite a lot of perfectly good hardware into the bargain because nobody (read: manufacturers who have financial incentive to release "Vista" versions of the hardware) can be bothered to make a Vista driver. And Vista drivers provide what advantage? Possibly better security with some extremely crap drivers but I haven't seen evidence of that. Significant breaka
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Latin: "quantus," for basically "how much."
- A quantity or amount.
- A specified portion.
- Something that can be counted or measured.
Nothing to do with any particular size, but has been associated with sub-atomic scales because of physics research that uses the term, Also "quanta" (plural of quantum) with the same definition.
However, "quantum leap" is a very well-used term to denote a huge change in current thinking without any direct evolution in between (like the jumping between discrete quantum states).
Wi
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The controversy with XP was mostly Windows 2000 owners and they didn't like XP's activation anti-piracy measure
Personally, I didn't like XP not because of activation, but because it was extremely buggy. Unavailable network printers, lost connections to NT4 servers, Office 2000 causing error messages regularly... At first I was asking every users to report to me any problems they saw, but after a few weeks I just asked them to click "YES" on the window asking if they wanted to send a report of the crash to Microsoft. XP was a complete piece of crap when released (compared to Win2K). It took at least a year before XP
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The general sentiment and tone of your comment is exactly the same of when XP was getting ready to come out.
That just makes it even worse. When I did use XP, I changed the style to classic, so the major change in XP was to make it look childish shit. All the time, Mac OS was looking amazing. Win 2k is still their best OS, because XP IS Win 2k, with a new shitty interface, more bloat, and some bug-fixes. Congrats Microsoft.
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And when 2K was release, /. was giddy over the leaked '24,000 bugs' memo. Everybody was talking about how it was yet another crappy OS from Microsoft.
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Operating systems are UIs; they are not intended to be performance boosters. Their task is to deliver the information that you need in a timely, neat and conclusive manner. As far as I hear, Windows 7 does this better than Vista as well as (at least when it comes to the neat part) XP.
Try thinking of it in terms of a human body: we're all pretty much the same, but with some differences in component performance. It all comes down to how the body is used and maintained.
Go ahead. Make a sex joke.
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Operating systems are UIs; they are not intended to be performance boosters.
No... operating systems are not UIs, they are only a part of it (sometimes). Aero exists as just a subsystem in Vista, and you don't need anything but the command line for Unix.
Operating systems exist so that the applications I use can be run on the hardware I own. That's really it.
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UURRRK. Operating systems are UI's? No they aren't. They are operating systems. This is the problem - MS has tied the GUI to the OS and now people associate the GUI with the OS. The OS is several layers below anything that needs to draw on the screen, always has been, still is. To make your OS boot even depend on there being graphics hardware is just a ludicrous assertion. This sort of thinking only leads to the statements I hear along the lines of "Oh, it looks different, it must work much better."
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Even then (Score:2)
You really can't beat some of the old, light weight OSes for speed. DOS will probably give you the best app performance you'll ever get. Why? Because DOS doesn't do anything. DOS will load your program and then get the hell out of the way unless you specifically place a call to one of its few services. It doesn't manage memory, it doesn't handle processes, it just does disk operations (it's well named).
For that very reason, you still see it used in embedded systems today. It loads up whatever app it is that
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The downside, of course, being keeping ems, xms, qemu and what not straight; manually tweaking the load or
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Please sir. You do not understand. Windows ain't done till Duke Nukem Forever can run!!!
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Vista is actually way more responsive than XP in most cases, it's the reaping every fraction of a percent of performance out of the system where Vista lacks, which is quite understandable given the responsiveness benefits Vista has.
That being said, i use Both Vista Professional 64bit and XP Professional 64bit daily. Vista at work, XP at home.
New Versions (Score:2)
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PunkBuster (Score:2)
For me, the single biggest problem with Windows 7 gaming is the lack of PunkBuster support, as EvenBalance are refusing to support the beta at this stage.
Fair enough, it is their choice, however the beta is public, so many of their customers are in the same boat here. It seems sad that the public statements seem to indicate they are not even willing to look at it.
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It may not be supported, but at least PunkBuster works on 64 bit Win7, at last for come definitions of "work". The first time I launched ET:QW I got kicked within seconds for not having PB installed. I used their update utility to install it, but still got kicked out of the game. Turned out the PB service didn't install properly or failed to start.
Searching the net suggested that it's pretty much impossible to get PB to work on Win7, and especially the 64 bit version. However, randomly dicking around with c
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I use all of the games I tested on exactly that platform - Vista x64 with over 4GB RAM.
I know all of the following work perfectly, as I play them all BF2, BF2142, COD:WAW, COD4, Far Cry 2, Crysis and ET:QW.
So yes, I AM blaming the beta.
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I think the crux of this is that for all the games, a whitelist of "allowed" API calls exists.
It would seem a lot of the W7 APIs are not on this list, or because all the addresses are now different, they are not recognised.
If it's the latter, I'm guessing they want the API to be stable before doing the hard work of whitelisting each API address. They might be working on it quietly, just refusing to promise anything until they have results.
I like this approach as it only ever leads to nice surprises for cons
Missing test: OpenGL (Score:3, Interesting)
Performance not the same as XP (Score:2)
Because the Tages DRM garbage that the publishers insisted on inflicting on Egosofts game isn't compatabile with Windows 7 even though it works OK on Vista (which came as a shock).
Are Tages doing anything about it ? Nope, they take the Creative Labs view that they don't support beta systems.
I leave it to the reader to decide whether the defective by design belongs with Tages or Microsoft.
Jesus people (Score:2, Insightful)
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Why yes, I did consider that perhaps this OS is constantly informing Microsoft of everything I do, tracking my credit card purchases and reading my email - but are you telling me it's true?
Seriously, computers are so fast nowadays that any OS that can noticeably slow down your computer due to overhead is probably extremely badly written, or doing all sorts of nasty things (like "trusted computing", or encrypting DRM re
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If only I had mod points.
I'm so sick of the "well hardware is faster now so should be faster than on the same hardware!"
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If they drop features to make it faster than XP then everyone will bitch that it doesn't have those features.
People would in general, but I doubt they would here on Slashdot. A lean no-bullshit version of Windows that had much lower requirements would probably go down pretty well, doubly so if it were a lot cheaper.
Positive review from /. scandalous (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, after looking at the benchmarks this is what I came away thinking about Vista, Win7, XP overall.
If you want DX10 performance, Vista.
If you want DX9 performance on iCore7, Win7.
If you want DX9 and have a midrange system, most do, WinXP.
The article's take on the results can be summarized in two words, "mixed bag."
Ironically, Slashdot comes away with a bright and sunny view on things.
Their analysis as usual does not coincide with the reality presented by the results.
Of course, it all depends on what games you most prefer to play, for example Far Cry plays poorly in XP in all cases versus Vista/Win7.
I find it interesting they have no benchmarks in DX10 for Fallout 3, CoD: Waw, and several more. I looked into it just now and these particular titles lack DX10 support.
What this all means is, if you haven't upgraded to an iCore7 and most interesting games still use DX9, stick with XP. If you only play DX10 games, stay with Vista regardless what architecture you're on. Win7 fails at DX10, except in FarCry where it only does one or two fps better than Vista.
There you go, an honest analysis of the results.
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What DRM are you concerned about? Be specific.
The only DRM that is a real concern to me is WGA, and that is in XP as well.
Re:DRM? (Score:5, Informative)
This post deserves more coverage here. The "additional" DRM in Vista (And 7) does not in any way affeact anything you could do on XP, OTHER than being able to play HD content from a Blu-ray or HD-DVD (if you still have one lying around) device.
It doesn't monitor your MP3s, it doesn't scan your XviDs or anything like that, it's just HDCP crap. If you have a problem with this, go complain to the likes of the MPAA who forced this crap on us, not Microsoft who just wanted to make sure future content would play on future OSs.
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No, don't.
Google "Protected Media Path" instead.
Vista provides process isolation and continually monitors what kernel-mode software is loaded. If an unverified component is detected, then Vista will stop playing DRM content, rather than risk having the content copied.
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Presumably that is talking about while the content is playing.
Plus, it's only checking the kernel for tampering (pretty sensible with the threat of viruses forever hanging over Windows's head), not scanning your mp3 collection.
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Still only affects the media, but it's evil as hell.
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No, you can choose between custom kernel mode software, and watching blu-ray / HD-DVD.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to take some random bloke's word for it that their kernel mode software isn't going to trash my Windows kernel or use kernel hooks to keylog or spy on me etc. I'd much rather trust the people who made the kernel itself to say what's safe. On Linux that would mean only installing kernel stuff from distro repros, on Windows it means driver signing.
Not that I'm expecting to watch bl
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If you're writing kernel mode software yourself, then the DRM guys can't trust you not to be hooking in a ripping the video out from under the DRM. Do you blame them? It's not like they know what your program does.
This would be why you have separate entertainment (DRM-supporting) and work (development) environments.
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I'd hazard a guess and say it's HDCP being crap. Even if it was a hardware or software fault, it still highlights the problems caused by it. And for what? It certainly hasn't prevented piracy of Blu-ray disks.
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I can't say I've ever "captured a stream" on wire to copy anything for years (audio/video tapes were my last)... I really don't understand this whole DRMing the cable, it's not like anyone's stupid enough to use that to copy media, is there?
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Note: My
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You say that, but those pirating windows really don't need to worry about it. Meanwhile there have been several reports of WGA incorrectly reporting legitimate copies as pirated. So, WGA is really only a concern (practically speaking) if you *don't* steal Windows.
And, of course, there are the ideological bits. I prefer "innocent until proven guilty" to "guilty until proven innocent", especially when I'm giving money to Microsoft.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Very rare, unsubstantiated reports.
Most pirates were bamboozled when WGA hit. The internet was awash with "My pc wont do updaets nemore, it says sumthing about wga. I have a copy of windows I got from a friend, how do I fix it?" Then came the lol-worthy "paste this javascripty junk into your address bar, then search for updates" fix, then came the version wars with the dlls.
The average pirate (people who got it from their friend, your parents, etc) will but dumbstruck when they encounter WGA blocking the
Re:DRM? (Score:5, Insightful)
Was it informative? No.
Was it interesting? No.
Was it funny? No.
Was it an emotional remark, offering no information or reasoning? Yes. --> Troll
Now, a reasonable discussion of why you won't purchase anything with DRM might be informative, but that veers into off-topic - since the article is about performance of Windows 7, not whether or not you will buy it, or how you feel about DRM.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Gotta love how the original off-topic, troll post gets a +1 insightful but the post that points out that it's very clearly off-topic and a troll gets modded down... as a troll.
It makes it all the more mystifying that people claim there's no groupthink on Slashdot.
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't a Troll a post which is designed to annoy people or cause arguments? Posting uninformed emotional opinions isn't trolling.
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm, perhaps like this guy [wikipedia.org] does.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a statistic unrelated to the article though. Game publishers implement DRM on their games, not the OS. Windows 7's gaming performance is being tested because moving from XP to Vista saw a serious drop in performance; this story has nothing to do with DRM.
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Re: (Score:2)
I find the handling of administrator permissions to be much better in Vista.
I also would be surprised if Linux 2.9 is faster than 2.6. As machines get faster, so the operating system can take on more and more tasks, which inevitably means they get slower.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Fair enough.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe it's optimistic moaning... the point of a beta is to get feedback.
With no feedback, nothing gets fixed.
The more vocal people are about their issues, the more likely they are to be fixed.