Win7 Rating system?

[pcnoob101]

why does Vista give me:
CPU-5.1
MEM-4.8
AERO-5.9
GAMING-5.9
HDD-5.9
(4.8 vista score)

and when I boot in Win7 I get:
CPU-5.5
MEM-5.5
AERO-7.3
GAMING-7.3
HDD-5.9
(5.5 Win7 score)


any reasons why?

 

[dubesinhower]

because the total score you can receive in windows 7 is higher than vista? the highest score for vista you could get was 5.9, but in windows 7 its 7.9 or something.

 

[JonathanDeane]

Also I think they did some better memory management in 7 VS Vista, at leas thats what I have heard.

Since your ram is handled better all your scores will go up just a little. (also performance from Vista to 7 is better)

 

[Devastator_uk]

Were you comparing 32bit vs 32bit, or 64bit vs 64bit, or 32bit vs 64bit?

Also the biggest improvement is the graphics (Aero/Gaming), which is because Vista is capped at 5.9, so really you could probably assume that on Vista they would also get 7.3.

As for the CPU and RAM, it could be down to better support, maybe Win7 uses some CPU instructions that Vista doesn't, and maybe they've the way it handles RAM. It could also be down to other processes running in the background that are affecting the benchmark results.

 

[buzznut]

Yes, for all these reasons and also I am not certain its an apples to apples comparison. More than likely improvements have been made to the testing regimen.

I have noticed that as new hardware comes out, my 7 score keeps dropping. I didn't notice that as much with vista, although I wouldn't consider that evidence. I didn't spend a lot of time with vista.

 

[The_Prophecy]

Because MS was increasing the maximum score on the WEI scale, any existing scores had to be adjusted. Consider the following hypothetical scenario:

I have a video card which under Vista which currently scores 5.9. If I go and install Windows 7, where the maximum score is 7.9 the score of my existing hardware must be adjusted accordingly, since a lower end video card of relative performance should always score lower no matter what OS is being run, not higher simply because it was released later.

How would you feel if you had a Geforce GTX 295 which scored 5.9 in both Vista and 7, and a friend had a Geforce GTX - lets say for the sake of argument - 360 which scored 5.9 in Vista, but scored 7.1 in Windows 7?

Bottom line: If the scale increases, existing scores must be adjusted to match the new scale.

As other people have pointed out, existing scores will keep dropping relative to new hardware being released as well. But after having said all of this, i'm sure many of you reading this now know why I don't pay much attention to the WEI index.