Because of WordPress gallery restrictions, I have to put the screenshots I took in another post… the UT ones look pretty. Please can the wizards at WordPress fix this, so you can pick and choose which images appear in the gallery. Ta very much.
After a hectic week, I finally got round to doing this. I am making this a two-part benchmark test, I had difficulty trying to cram everything and Windows 7 was being obstinate with the install. So first up is gaming performance, later I will be doing audio and video encoding. My PC setup is an SLi based system for two graphics cards, but in this instance I chose not to test this as the NVIDIA drivers for Windows 7 are still premature. Therefore, SLi will be turned off. In addition, the base OS for Vista and Windows 7 will be 64 bit for these tests. I had been running an over clocked machine for a while, but for this I have set everything back to stock settings. The resolution for all tests was at 1900 x 1280.
GFX: BFG NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX OC2 (these cards are over clocked by the manufacturer)
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Extreme CPU X9650 @ 3.00GHz
MEM: 4GB DDR2
For a more detailed spec sheet, click here. I know how the geeks like looking at those lovely numbers. The tools used and the games in question are as follows:
3DMark has always been the benchmark of choice, there is also a version called Vantage but I am sticking to the old-fashioned 2006 version. Unreal Tournament has been a favourite of mine, and number 3 looks absolutely beautiful. With Call of Duty, this latest iteration takes the series to a new level. Providing the player with a visceral experience, you are taken back to the apocalyptic setting of World War II. And finally, FRAPS has been a mainstay for capturing gaming video footage and frame rate stats.
I won’t go into too much detail about how I struggled with the Windows 7 install, suffice it to say it took longer than expected. Firstly, it refused to install on my Hitachi SATA hard drive and when it did finally install I couldn’t find drivers for my Netgear WG111T wireless dongle. I had to use a network cable to grab Windows Updates, according to NVIDIA the drivers for Windows 7 can only be done via this method and downloading from the NVIDIA website is not an option. The graphics drivers listed on Windows Update is the same as the one installed so I didn’t need it anyway, but it did install the NVIDIA Control Panel so it wasn’t a complete waste of time. Without further ado, I will let the numbers speak for themselves.
3DMark 2006
Not a good start, 3DMark 2006 refused to run on Windows 7 with some obscure error about Direct3D. But here is my score under Vista x64 and also the error I encountered. Perhaps I need to patch it, but the exact same version ran fine in Vista so who knows.
Vista x64
Windows 7 x64
Unreal Tournament 3
Initially, you need to install UT3 and then the HardwareOC tool afterwards. I really like this tool, it does a flyby using a map of your choice. There are no players, so that variable is taken out of the equation. I chose the Deimos map, it’s one of my favourites and arguably the most dangerous. Don’t look down is all I can say.
Benchmark Information
Demo: Deimos
Quality: High Quality
Anisotropic filtering: 16×
Vista x64
Score = 60 FPS
Windows 7 x64
Score = 61 FPS
If these results are anything to go by, there’s not much in it at all. This is from NVIDIA’s press release: “NVIDIA has been working closely with Microsoft to ensure that pre-beta users of Windows 7 get full support and an unsurpassed graphics experience on NVIDIA-based graphics cards.”. Hmmm, the jury is still out I think. The word “unsurpassed” is slightly exaggerated on their part.
Call of Duty – World at War
I used FRAPS to record the frame rate, playing the first map in the story “Semper Fi”.
Vista x64
| Frames | Time (ms) | Min | Max | Avg |
| 13737 | 300000 | 27 | 79 | 45.79 |
Windows 7 x64
| Frames | Time (ms) | Min | Max | Avg |
| 13901 | 300000 | 25 | 68 | 39.67 |
Vista x64 has a slight edge, but again not much difference in the scores. Most of the settings were set to high, body count set to small.
Conclusion
Of course, my tests were done quickly and also different games will behave differently in terms of performance. But as far as I’m concerned, if Windows 7 is like this upon release then there’s no incentive to upgrade. Yes it does look nicer granted, the interface has been tweaked and there are some features I like. It is not enough, however, to take a leap of faith. History dictates that Version 1 will always be bugged to the hilt, so waiting for the first service pack would be my port of call.
My next benchmark test will see how well Windows 7 uses my quad core for encoding. Let’s hope we see something special.
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