Benchmarking Windows 7: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?

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[citation][nom]MonkeyMan1979[/nom]To all the people that are claiming Windows 7 feels faster than Windows Vista, keep in mind that you have a fresh install of Windows 7, you were probably running a Vista installation that was 1 or 2 years old, if not older. Of course it is going to feel faster. If you had done a fresh install of Vista instead of Windows 7 you would be saying that your fresh install of Vista feels faster too.[/citation]

False pretense: The benchmarks in the article were performed on fresh loads, so your comments are only a diversion.
 
[citation][nom]abbadon_34[/nom]I'm getting really sick of Toms pushing a particular hardware or software. I miss the days of true comparisons and informational articles....not to mention ads that don't block your view and follow you around[/citation]

You might be seeing ads that I don't...but I'm still using XP on my personal machine. I've no dog in this race, I only test the stuff I'm given to test.
 
"Windows 7 shows a moderate improvement in our highest Crysis test,
but results that don’t yield smooth gameplay have little significance."

Where exactly is this moderate improvement? Even at 2560x1600,
the supposed 'improvement' is not even half a percent, ie. well
within margins of error and thus statisically completely
meaningless. I wish sites would stop ascribing significance to
such small fps differences. Anything less thn a 1% difference
shouldn't even warrant comment.

Win7 shows *no* improvement for Crysis, not a moderate improvement.
It would be more useful to simply say it's the same as it's
certainly not any slower.

And btw, 36fps is not an 'unacceptable' frame rate (re Stalker
at 2560x1600). Would be different if the minimum rate was much
lower, but this data is not included in the graphs.

Why is Win7 so slow for TMPGEnc? That's one of the main applications
I use, though I'm currently running XP Pro so as others have said
it is hard for me to judge whether I would gain or lose if I
switched to Win7.

Can you please add XP results? Without this, the article is
largely useless. A lot of people are still using XP, as toms &
other sites have so often reported.

Ian.

 
Two service packs from now I'll bet Vista is faster than Win7. I appreciate security, but at what point does an OS having complete control over your system just become bloatware? We don't even need 8GBs of RAM or four cores yet. (and they're coming out with six cores soon and pushing 16GBs?) It seems the operating system keeps begging for resources, while the games don't usually require it. Crysis was said to be poorly optimized. I wonder if that game could have looked about that good and run on a mid ranged P4 chip if it had been written better.

Just take a look at the minimum specs on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2...

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/call-duty-modern-warfare-requirements,8922.html

I'm sorry, but who even needs four cores for surfing the net and playing modern games?

I don't mean to turn this into some sort of AMD fanboy rant, but they keep undercutting the competition on price (didn't they do that with the Athlon too?). That's why I may as well start calling myself a fanboy. The horror of admitting that...
Oh well, its Halloween soon.
 
I'm confused as to why the results in this article are different than the ones at Anand. For example, at Anand, Win 7 was faster in the Winrar compression test than Vista. This is not so at Tom's. Could it just be that the differences aren't statistically significant and it's simple variance?
 
Nice article. I'd also like XP to win7 on laptops comparison.

For example, I have HP pavilion zv6000 with XP, 3ghz amd and a gig of ram. Im about to upgrade it to win7 so I'd like to know what the benchmarks say how will my mom feel using the new OS.

I'm using win7 on my q6600 and 4gb of ram and its naturally amazing, but its hardly the same as that old laptop.
 
if games are faster in XP, cause they use DX9( that is less complicated than newer versions), not 10 or 11, and by the way, comparing OS'es in game benchmark is not reasoning anything, it's the hardware that give the game the performance.
I think the real bench must be about power consumption in idle and under load conditions, battery time for battery powered PC's, security and ease of use and startup time, not games!
in my opinion, 7 is far more greater than Vista. more smooth and easier UI, better dynamic memory and service management, better hardware driver support, better security, and etc.
and all that, after SP1 of 7, will be better, a whole lot better.
 
What I would have liked to see was a comparison of XP, Vista, and Win 7 on older hardware. Maybe I'm wrong here but I believe most people building a new computer these days will go out and purchase the newest OS to go along with their new hardware. I'm running core 2 duo in my gaming desktop, and in my workstation laptop, I want to see whether it is worth it for those of us running older hardware (not necessarily Legacy) to upgrade to the new OS or not.

I can say from personal experience that Win 7 RC on my laptop runs so much smoother than it did with Vista business on it. I'm sure this is due in part my only having 2GB of RAM in it though.
 
[citation][nom]renz496[/nom]windows xp is great but we need to move forward because technologies advancement need to grow[/citation]

If moving forward is so important, why does Microsoft include VirtualPC/XP Compatibility Mode in Windows 7 rather than leave them distinct from one another?

I personally run Windows XP x64 on 3 machines at my house, and the performance is great. If I get a chance to do a dual boot with Win 7 Pro or Ultimate, I'll give it a shot and test it.

But the minute Win 7 chokes on running anything I currently use, it's out the door and I will look more toward a Linux solution rather than another MS one.

If with Win 7 I have to go download XP Comp. Mode, install, set it up, etc., why not just get a Linux distro and install Wine?

Ah well. I like the points showing the pluses and minuses of Win 7. Thanks, Thomas.
 
Well, the system used in the setup is at upper end, Vista will perform well in par with Windows 7 since its well beyond its Minimum requirement.
How about using a dual core AMD with 2gig memory, as the test setup, then lets how Vista will perform against Windows 7.
 
I have used vista 64 business for 3 years (sp2 now) --primarily for gaming.

I have had Win7 for a few days now.

There is zero noticable difference for me. All my tests score the same. Windows takes the same amount of time to boot. The games all feel the same (same frame rates) [well except world of warcraft now crashes the odd time). Games take just as long to load.

There is 0 difference in gaming. Oh and the same games that gave me compatibility problems in vista like MoH😛A do so in Win7.

So far i have yet to see any justification in spending 124$ cdn for Win7 Professional. It looks and feels just like Vista 64 sp 2

//intel core 2 duo 6600 //ati 4890 dark knight -512 mb // 4 gig OcZ memory (1x4)
 
It's great that you guys test the totally built gamer machine setup. However, it shows that Tom's is now out of touch with reality. Most of the world has switched to laptops (even software developers use laptops now guys). As noted above, testing with the latest custom built desktop hardware ignores reality. What most people, including IT professionals, want to know is will Win7 perform on a common business laptop. I for one have stuck with XP for real work, simply because Vista was too bloated. In fact, I've been moving stuff over to Mac, simply because I don't have to wait for my PC all day when opening the same types of apps I've been using for 15 yrs (docs, spreadsheets, email). Sad...
 
Who are these mysterious creatures with driver problems for XP x64? I want to meet one of them to believe it. I have steering wheels, joysticks, mice, keyboards, printers, video cards, and sound cards coming out of my ears. Each one has the required driver and it works flawlessly. The only setback is that they never released an SP3 for it, which is a hardly a setback. All that means is instead of downloading each update in one nice package when I decide to reformat, I have to select 'Download and Install All Updates'. Oh, that is just so difficult. *rolls eyes*
 
It was a bit to be expected; one of the reasons Vista had such a slow response is because it focuses solely on the program, and gives display refresh a much lower thread priority.
Windows 7 addresses this issue by putting more resources into getting a fast display response, while lowering the focus on the actual program.

In reality very few minutes of our time using a computer we need to encode audio or video, or even the majority of people are very few times using their pc to play games.
The majority of the time, most people are busy opening folders in explorer, browsing webpages, starting and closing applications, working with the start bar.
That's what gives the biggest improvement on Win7.
Things appear faster; and the feel is much like MacOs or Linux.
Windows 9x then WinXP had the fastest response time.
Then Win7 Linux and MacOs.
Win Vista received bad comments because it took too long before one could actually see the start bar appearing, or see the contents of a folder.


It's all very nice and stuff these benchmarks, but I WANT TO SEE AN XP VS WIN7 COMPARISON!!!
Those 2 operating systems are way different in structure.
And for those with netbooks it might be interesting because even to today we see netbooks being sold with WinXP as their main OS!

It should give people the opportunity to choose XP or 7 for their netbooks.
But more likely XP will win for netbooks.
 
[citation][nom]renz496[/nom]windows xp is great but we need to move forward because technologies advancement need to grow[/citation]

why do people say this.

if what your doing in windows xp will be exactly the same as what you do in vista or windows 7. Still using the same apps, or using the same apps in a VM because the OS cant actually run it just to say you have the latest OS.

when you upgrade to windows 7 what will you be doing different, will you stop using all of your programs and just spend the entire day playing with the eye candy like someone who is autistic and has OCD?

or will you run the same apps and do pretty much what you are doing now in windows xp, only slower now that you have a new more resource hungry OS?

compared to windows xp, windows 7 lost a few features. if you find the list of features that you lost when moving from xp to vista, and compare that to the features you gain and loose with moving from vista to windows 7

for me, there is really nothing pushing me to windows vista or windows 7 because xp is doing everything I want to do, and it is doing it faster. and the OS it's self is only using 45-50MB of memory at startup and boots faster, especially after cleaning up the startup. (I have a crappy hard drive, 80GB hitatchi and it is the main bottleneck when loading windows xp, it only had a read/write speed or around 50MB/s when doing a linear read or write while a more modern hard drive found in a high end system from today will do 100MB/s+
and for me windows xp boots in 15-17 seconds (to get to desktop and have all of the loading done and the OS ready to use) (if there is less to load then you can load it faster. (it is faster to load 2 boxes into a car than it is to 20)


if toms hardware really wants to show which OS truly performs best, get a low end, mid range and high end PX and on all of them do a xp vs vista vs windows 7 benchmark
 
I can't help but think that Vista through updates and SP1 has had optimizations. As 7 grows I think it will surpass anything Vista does now.

As for "feel", this may be the most important difference between the two OS's. 7 feels faster, and less clunky; it makes all the difference in the world to me. It is probably the most subtle and qualitative difference, and it won't be discernible from benchmarks.
 
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