As the complete version of Windows 7 has already been launched into the mass production and the number of those shifting from their previous Microsoft operation systems is gradually (but not so rapidly) growing we decided to once again focus on comparison of the two products that have created much buzz in the tech community: Vista that has been too criticized to date and Windows 7 that is too extolled and applauded now.
Actually as it is seen from many tests and examinations the two operating platforms differ slightly with the latter just making the features of its predecessor more fluent and less consumptive for the system resources. It is obvious that Windows 7 has come just to excuse and smooth over shortcomings of Vista which produced a great deal of grumble on the part of the users.
Here we cite some performance tests conducted by independents experts at MaximumPC and DriverHeaven magazines.
MaximumPC tests
For its performance assessment MaximumPC spent over 30 hours testing Windows 7 Professional x64 in a battery of benchmarks designed to measure application performance, network performance, disk performance, and finally, gaming. The hardware configuration included Intel Core 2 Quad Q9770 Extreme processor, 4GB of DDR2 memory, a 1TB Barracuda 7200.12 drive, and an ATI Radeon 4890 videocard. Gaming performance testing was conducted on a manufacturer-overclocked GeForce GTX 285 with both the ATI and Nvidia’s drivers.the operating systems tested were Windows 7 x64, Windows XP x86 with Service Pack 3, and Windows Vista x64 with Service Pack 2.
Application performance
The results obtained during this assessment show that there is no indisputable argument that can be used to the favor of any of these OSs. Each of them has its strong and weak points showing better results in different conditions.
Hard drive performance shows that Windows 7 is a few percent slower than XP SP3, but faster than Vista SP2.
Most of the comparison was made by MaximumPC in either multi-threaded CPU performance (Main Concept, ProShow), hard drive performance (PC Mark Vantage), or a real-world mixture of the two (Photoshop, Premiere)
As it is seen from the charts in all application benchmarks Windows 7’s performance was close to the readings of XP. As for Vista it showed much better results in a number of areas which is likely due to enhancements made by Microsoft to its latest versions of this infamous OS.
Gaming performance
When testing game performance MaximumPC used both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 on both ATI and Nvidia hardware.
As the charts show when it comes to DirectX 10 benchmarks, both ATI and Nvidia have almost identical scores in Vista and Windows 7. As for DirectX 9 benchmarks the picture is quite different. Depending on the benchmark, Windows 7 ranged from about 10% faster to about 10% slower than Windows Vista.
Network performance
From the charts composed by MaximumPC you can see that the magazine found network scores of Vista and XP are worse than those of Windows 7. The latter shows fast speeds in files transfer.
DriverHeaven test
DriverHeaven test touched only on the gaming performance comparison. The magazine covered a number of games where Vista, Windows 7 and XP show different scores with XP certainly losing to the two siblings.
The hardware and software configuration used by DriverHeaven in its gaming performance assessment was as follows:
Core i7-975 EE
3x2Gb Corsair Dominator GT @ 1600 8-8-8-24-2T
Foxconn Renaissance
GeForce GTX 295
Samsung SyncMaster XL30
BFG EX-1200w PSU
Sony BDU-X10S Blu-Ray drive
D-Link Wireless N Dual Channel USB stick
1x Intel 80Gb X25-M SSD OS
3x WD Raptor Hard Drives (Games on RAID 0 Drives)
Arctic Cooling MX-3 Paste
Coolit Domino
Razer Megalodon
Windows XP Pro 64bit + SP2
Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit + SP2
Windows 7 Ultimate 64Bit
Forceware 190.62
DirectX 9.0c/DirectX 10
World In Conflict: Soviet Assault
Tom Clancy HAWX
Race Driver GRID
Left 4 Dead
Crysis Warhead
Empire Total War
Lost Planet Colonies
Fraps Pro
We decided to show as a sample the results obtained on testing only one game known as World In Conflict: Soviet Assault. As is known the game was released in September 2007. An expansion pack was released in March 2009 under the name World in Conflict: Soviet Assault; however, the console version has since been dropped from its productions by Activision and instead only exists as the expansion to the PC version.
DriverHeaven reports that when playing World In Conflict on Windows XP it is impossible to select DirectX 10 rendering or cloud shadows. Additionally the shadow quality is slightly lower in DirectX9 mode with the distance where shadows are visible being reduced.
Thus, the game was tested when running each of OS through a section of gameplay on Very High Settings with DirectX 9 mode at 1920x1200 and 2560x1600. The test was repeated via DirectX 10 with the higher detail settings enabled.
Well, the results showed that in DirectX9 mode both Windows 7 and Vista are better than XP at both 1920x1200 and 2560x1600.
At the higher end of DirectX 10 which XP does not support Windows 7 outperforms Vista by a small margin with both operating systems having improved shadow effects and enhanced realism.
Conclusion
As you can see from these two analysis actually Windows 7 is not significantly better than Vista when it comes to hardware performance. In many cases there is little difference between Windows 7 and XP as well as between Windows 7 and Vista. Certainly main achievements but not the outstanding (to our opinion) are network operation enhancements (which in fact similar both at Vista and Windows 7) and gaming performance. Thereby, it is no surprise that many users of XP still prefer to keep to their OS as recent survey from InfoWorld shows. We can only say that most of panegyrics granted to Windows 7 today are just a kind of exaggeration and as one person said “if I have enough functionality with my XP operating system why should I shift to Windows 7 which is just a slightly debugged Vista and buy higher capacity hardware for it?”