And the doctor ain’t happy. Up to now we got to talk about happy things for the beta, that old Microsoft would logically focus upon the user experience in installing and using the OS as opposed to fine tuning and enhancing the minutia of video game performance. But still there are some massive performance losses in here, in some cases related to enhanced visual effects featured in DX10 and in other cases just because of the OS difference. This here, is probably the reason why gamers will drop Windows 7, which is otherwise an extremely usable OS.  Today I’m going to post the details regarding how each of the tests were conducted but mostly let the numbers speak for  themselves. Also there are a few interesting caveats in the numbers I feel obliged to point out. So, without further ado, Windows 7 vs. XP benchmarks.

Ok, lets go through these things one by one.

Left 4 Dead: This was a difficult one, due to the changing nature of the game’s content. To offset this I ran three one minute benchmarks and averaged them. Although it wasn’t perfect, especially since I found myself reaching further in the later (XP) benchmarks, however I’m hoping the visual fidelity outside the apartment is not that different from that within. Map used was the first part of No Mercy.

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts:       I just used the included ‘performance test’ for this one. I’m assuming that the test will have been optimized for XP and Vista as they were around at the time of it’s creation, so that may have given XP a bit more of a boost.

Bioshock Static: 1 minute benchmark taken from a standing position. Looking at the minimum rates for Windows 7 DX9 one can only surmise that something came across the screen causing the drop or something triggered on the computer during this time, so it’s probably an anomaly.

Bioshock WATER MOVE: The important thing to note here is that the main benefit of DX10 in Bioshock is much greater water ripple effects, so a speed drop of this would be indicative of only water areas (of which there are more than a few) rather than speeds as a whole. Still, the DX10 water does look stunning compared to the DX9 water. 1 min benchmark of me walking and jumping in water and watching my own rippling trail.

Fallout: 1 min benchmark of me standing with my back to the Megaton main entrance. Some characters walked across in all incidents. There is a substantial drop between Windows 7 and XP, especially surprising considering that the engine has no DX10 capabilities. On the AA settings I enabled 4x AA and 8x AF. It’s interesting to see that the framerate didn’t even drop by a single frame on average with AA enabled in Windows 7.  Regardless, the FPS of AA enabled XP was still about 5 FPS faster, so no contest.

To conclude, the Windows 7 beta has been optimised (rather sensibly) for everyday use instead of hardcore gaming. Which I expected. And frankly, I should be glad that games work at all without any major graphical flaws. But to be honest, seeing as how Windows 7 is such a straight up port of Vista with a new UI I expected all the major changes to be under the hood, reulting in a faster OS. But it’s clear that if this is the case, it’s certainly not in the beta. Which is totally understandable. Yet I still come off a bit disappointed in Microsoft, who haven’t made a magic OS  which is all things to all people. I feel so dejected, that my round up of Windows 7′s non working features will be left for tomorrow because I fear that if faced with more negativity about the OS I might uninstall it, crying.

Because it’s Windows Vista. Windows 7 could just as well be a service pack for all the features it brings to the table. I’m sure there are some code optimisations under the hood, however the reistry is still there, so there is probably not enough of a change to really release a new OS. Truly the only reason this can be released as a separate OS is because everybody hates Vista so much. For example I recently had a conversation with my fairly tech savvy girlfriend, who came out with some rather unexpected vitriol regarding Vista. Now she’s an XP user, so when I threw down the gauntlet as to why she despised the OS so, her reasons were as follows:  She dislikes the video enhancements and is annoyed by UAC. One she really hasn’t tried and the other is possible to disable.  This is a person who is tech interested and literate, as well.  So while there is all this vitriol for Vista, everybody I know is excited about 7. Also the less tech interested a person is, the more excited by 7 they are.  So while for a Vista user there may be very little need to upgrade to 7, there is quite the chasm between XP and 7.

There are a few areas of differance between the two OS’s and I frankly do not have the concentration to mention them all right now so instead I’ll focus on a little issue known as speed. Windows 7 is a speedy OS. Not linux speedy or even OSX speedy but it’s certainly the fastest microsoft product I’ve ever used. I’ve got a couple of XP vs 7 benchamrks I took on my rig, (the specs of which I’ll post on a seperate page) which all put Windows 7 ahead under fairly similar circumstances (background processes, such as steam, xfire, winamp, AVG free and FRAPS). Granted, none of the speeds are tremondously differant, but for the power user that does uses the computer every minute of every day, it’ll add up to increased productivity. Furthermore the OS simply feels more snappy, possibly due to the way windows sort of zoom around the screen. Which should be counter intuitive to the OS’s snappiness, however it does so to mask that fraction of a second while the computer pulls the window out of the cache, so you never get that effect of half of the window appearing normally and half appearing white, only to fix itself in another half a second. However, to a techie nothing speaks louder than cold ahrd numbers so here are the underwhelming benchmark results on the same system.

The scale is in minutes, imperfectly translated into decimals. So .3 is actually 30 seconds and not 20. I’m sure there’s some form of graphing program that is just begging me to use a scale based on 60, however Openoffice Calc was not tat program. So all the bars are out of skew, but what the hell. They’re just a way to present numbers.

Rambling aside, what do the numbers actually say? Firstly that the file system is reasonably similar on both systems, with only a 11 second difference in the replication of a couple of GB. The difference in rar speed is obviously something that will only widen in the future as the OS nears release and the winrar team develop a bit more in the more efficient Windows 7 environment. The main difference is of course in the boot times.  While boot times vary largely between computers, this article from Lifehacker (http://lifehacker.com/5076370/windows-7-preview-boots-20-faster-than-vista)  provides pages full of comments of people reporting differences between XP and 7 boot times, even if the Lifehacker team didn’t find any. So at worst there is no difference, at beast it can improve by about a 1/3 like in my case.  However, not only is the boot manger-login screen quicker, so is login-screen to usable PC, as can be seen in the 42 second difference between XP and 7 in my last test. Note this time was for Firefox to actually become usable, not just to hang there for a second.

Although the differences are nothing to be snuffed at over the long term, the numbers are certainly not mind blowing. That could be a pretty accurate summation of my Windows 7 experience so far, however why don’t we both just pretend I didn’t say that so you keep reading ? ^^

Tomorrow I shall be posting a series of benchmarks I feel people will probably care a bit more about: 3d performance. Keep in mind this blog is focusing on the XP to 7 transition so many will undergo, so the main difference I foresee in the numbers will be due to DX10 optimisations as opposed to windows 7 being that much faster. However, we shall see as I shall endeavor to test applications in DX9 mode when available.  You know, it would appear that I have gone off on a massive tangent from my original topic of what applications work and which don’t. So I shall post for you a list of all the apps which haven’t worked for me so far.

All of them. In a week of power use, I have not encountered an application where the Vista 32-bit version won’t work. However, it would be entirely disingenuous to suggest I’ve had no issues.

1. Popular gaming instant messenger has a number of incompatibilities caused by some change to IE. The end result is that the information bar on the app’s right does not work, as well as any of the uploading menus. If I take a e I’ll just be presented with a white plane and “Áccept/Decline” and despite selecting accept, none of my sweet Left 4 Dead screenshots seem to upload

Screenshot cropped for privacy's sake. Not that anyone reads this.

2. This is the serious one that prevents me from leaving XP in a ditch. Punkbuster, the anti-cheating system employed in many games such as WAR and COD4, detects the changed Windows 7 files as hacks and promptly kicks me from any game I enjoy with punkbuster enabled. Huge issue here, and likley one that won’t be fixed until Windows 7 is approaching launch, unless perhaps the beta testers make an awful lot of noise.

3. It keeps resetting World of Warcraft’s resolution to something awkward and windowed.

These are all the programs which, off the top of my head have displayed strange behaviours that is attributable to Windows 7. There are some problems with the native Windows 7 functions, which I shall visit alongside my 3d comparative benchmarks tomorrow or the day after. Daily seems to be perhaps a bit often for this blog,  maybe every second day is better suited. So for the moment I’m going to go for a bi-daily deadline with extra posts whenever the inspiration hits me.So look forward to some FPS benchmarks tomorrow, and my vitriol (word of the day, right behind difference) either bundled in or the day after.

PS: Damn those Lifehackers and their quick boot times.

PPS: Whether it’s Windows 7 or just having no less programs installed, it takes about half as much time for the Windows 7 ‘Remove programs’ panel to populate as the XP one.

PPPS: Dragonforce: Ultra Beatdown. Their best album, although it takes a little while to get used to. Standouts are ‘The last journey home’ and ‘Reasons to live’

Living in bandwidth conservative Australia, I unfortunately cannot merely  download things when they take my fancy. A 2.5 GB OS boot disk is a lot down under, where the formally government owned telecommunications provider ‘Telstra’ price gouged heavily on internet rates, before anyone else jumped on the whole internet thing. As an end result, I am left paying $80 a month for 25 GB of bandwidth before I get shaped into the hellish speeds of 64kbps. Add to this cap my nature to power use my PC and a house hold with a computer for every person, and you’ve got all hell breaking loose around the mid time of the month and 20 GB is down the drain.

Probably the most conservative and backwards western nation in regards to the internet revolution. At the moment the government are attempting to impose torrent filtering via ISPs. GRRR

Wild tangents aide however, it did mean that I was unable to download the pre-beta PDC build of Windows 7, however when version 7000 (AKA Beta 1) was leaked out a few days ago (32 bit only folks, sorry) I decided to just take the plunge and give up on stealing Dead Space this month. I’m not sure what the rules are for posting crazy links, but here goes. http://thepira tebay.org/torrent/4603075/Windows_7_Beta_1_-_(32bit) . Is the torrent of the .iso I’m working with. It downloaded over a 18 hour period for me, however those of you with better share ratios/connections may have better luck.

Anyways, possessing the .iso (after a quick unrar http://www.rarlab.com/ gives you a 30 day trial of WinRAR, a good archive client) I quickly burnt it onto a DVD, using ImgBurn which is dead simple to use. Browse and grab the iso file and burn it on. No difficulties there.

Now, possessing my new Windows 7 Ultimate DVD I decided that I was going to install 7 onto a separate partition and dual boot it with XP rather than just upgrading my stable installation of XP SP3, which turned out to be good idea and it always good practice with beta clients. However, I only had one partition on my hard drive at the time (check by going to “‘Start-Control Panel-Computer Management- Disk management” or something similar) so I needed to reduce the size of my XP partition in order to create the new one. Now there are a plethora of ways to do this, mostly DOS based boot disks. However for a free and above all simple way to do this I used EASEUS Partition Manger 3.0 Home Edition, which is free. This can be found at ‘”http://www.partition-tool.com/”.

You can get to this resizing menu by right click on partition you wish to resize (generally the C drive) and selecting Resize/Move. Then just drag the bar up the top to the reduce the partition by the size you want your new windows 7 partition to be. I would recommend at least 20GB, I went for 100 GB my first time. The size will by and large be determined by how long you intend to use Windows 7 for, and whether you intend to use it daily and thus need your media files on it. Clicking Ok after reducing the size of your primary partition will not execute the action, merely queue it up. You must click apply to do so. However, in order to reduce the partition size the computer will restart and automatically boot into EASEUS in order to change about the partition size.  It will then reboot again into XP this time, however XP will prompt you to restart due to finding and installing new hardware. I recommend doing so.

I remember when it cost 200 dollars for a hard drive this size.

Now go into your Disk Management tool in the control panel and there should be some unallocated space. Right click on this unallocated section and create a new primary partition. This took about a quarter hour for my computer to do. No extra window pops up when this operation in underway, so you just have to wait until status of the new partition is again ”Healthy”.  From here installing Windows 7 is extremely simple. Turn off your computer, then just stick the DVD into your drive and turn the computer.  You’ll be greeted by a nice flashy screen which will eventually lead you to two options, whether to upgrade or custom install. You of course want to custom install, and then select the partition you created for this boot. Then just let it do it’s thing for about half an hour. It’ll restart a few times, but it does not require any input from you. So make a sandwich or read a book. Setup a profile and choose a language/timezone, you’ve just got a working copy of Windows 7.

If you did everything right, you should have something like this.

One final thing to do before you go about trying out the fun features of Windows 7 and before I end this post, be sure to download yourself some Windows 7 display drivers.

AMD

http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&questionID=39069

Haven’t used ém myself, but these Windows 7 test drivers have got good coverage in the press. They may have got something of a free pass however for being the first specific ones for the OS.

Nvidia

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

Use the VISTA drivers. I am using the 180.43 VISTA 32 bit drivers atm and have had no video issues. I am very happy with the driver compatibility of Windows 7.

This has been my first entry in XP to 7, hope you’ve enjoyed/learnt something.  I shall be coming back tomorrow with hopefully a bit shorter post, more editorial in nature and less instructional. Remember this blog will have a bit of a focus in gaming, and after having used the OS for 2-3 days almost exclusively I can honestly say that I think it is very usable by gamers. However there are many current downfalls to the beta version of the OS, which I shall address and rant about in tomorrow’s post. Till then.