Crysis

Publisher: Electronic Arts

We tested the game using the 64-bit executable under and DirectX 10 with the 1.21 patch applied. We used a custom timedemo recorded on the Harbor map which is more representative of gameplay than the built-in benchmark that renders things much faster than you're going to experience in game.

For our testing, we set all the settings to High. Because of how intense the game is, we tested with both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled at resolutions above 1,680 x 1,050 for the time being. There is currently no support for anisotropic filtering in the game, but you can still force it from the driver control panel.


The performance was consistently slower in every test for Windows 7. It's worth noting though that the Windows 7 drivers are still very early betas from Nvidia, which could simply explain the difference in a heartbeat. However, since Windows 7 is built around Vista with the same driver model (unlike the change from XP to Vista), it shouldn't change it too much - there's still room for some optimisations though, we're sure.

Left 4 Dead

Publisher: Valve

Valve's epic new Zombie co-op shooter, Left 4 Dead, adds cutting edge new features to the Source engine, like subtle motion blur and film grain post processing when set to Very High detail which we've tested at. We also enabled multi-core processing and disabled VSync in the in-game options.


Again, we see a consistently slower performance across every resolution in Left 4 Dead.

Call of Duty: World at War

Publisher: Activision

Call of Duty: World at War is Treyarch’s controversial World War II shooter set on the Pacific and Eastern fronts, where you switch roles between an American Marine and a Russian soldier who survives Stalingrad and follows the push into Berlin at the end of the war.

World at War uses a beefed up version of the proprietary engine used in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which was developed by Infinity Ward and has easily been the most successful game in the series. It uses the DirectX 9.0 renderer exclusively and features true world dynamic lighting, HDR lighting, dynamic shadowing and depth of field amongst other things.

We used the full retail version of the game downloaded from Steam, which was patched to version 1.1 and for our gameplay testing, we did a 90-second manual run through from the second mission in the game where you are part of a beach landing in the Pacific. It appears to be one of the more intensive parts of the game with lots of explosions, water, smoke and lighting effects thrown in for good measure.

All of the in-game settings were set to their maximum values, including texture details which were configured to 'Extra'. The 'Dual Video Cards' option was enabled for the multi-GPU configurations, but was disabled for all single GPU cards. Finally, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled from inside the game.


The performance difference is greater at higher resolutions and the gap between OS generations is certainly closer than in Left 4 Dead, but Vista is still faster here too.