Is 7 as fast as XP?

Gamers and performance enthusiasts across the world still swear by Windows XP, as its lower overheads, lack of pretty (pointless, in the case of Vista) Aero graphics and more hands-off disk management mean that a PC with Windows XP will generally still perform better than the same PC with Vista installed.

Of course, it's a key question to answer for anyone considering the upgrade to Windows 7. We put Microsoft's last three operating systems to the test on a fairly mid-range system by today's standards, but one we feel represents what a lot of our readers will have.

We installed each of the three operating systems on the same system - one after another - containing a Core 2 Quad Q6600, an Asus P5Q Pro motherboard, 4GB of Corsair 1,066MHz DDR2 memory, an ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB graphics card and a Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 hard drive. We updated each OS with all the latest security updates and Service Packs and then set about benchmarking the three configurations.








As we expected, Windows XP is still the fastest in a pure benchmarkathon, recording an overall score of 1,044 in the Custom PC benchmark suite. Vista scored 990 points while Windows 7 interestingly lagged behind, scoring 982 points - the major loss came in our Handbrake H.264 video encoding test, where it was five per cent slower than Vista and 12 per cent slower than XP.

Our multi-tasking test showed Windows 7 to be every bit as good as Windows XP though and this is a test that we feel more fairly represents the overall Windows 7 experience. Our remaining tests also show it to be faster than Windows Vista and XP, although 3DMark06 performs better on Windows XP - we'll be having a more detailed look at Windows 7's gaming performance in the near future.

It's not often that we say this, but we feel that our benchmark results don't really do Windows 7 justice. Windows 7 generally 'feels' faster and more responsive than Vista - almost like it's in a different league - and it's arguably even snappier than Windows XP; this isn't something that can easily be recorded in a benchmark and it's important not to underestimate the importance of system responsiveness.

A lot of this new found responsiveness comes down to Windows 7's new display driver model - WDDM 1.1 - which allows multiple applications to draw and update their graphics simultaneously. Vista's WDDM 1.0 only allowed a single application to draw to the screen at any one time, which explains why it feels unresponsive in comparison to Windows 7.

In addition to that, WDDM 1.1 no longer uses both graphics and system memory to store display elements, as Windows 7 can now access display elements directly from the graphics memory. This reduces the overall memory footprint, which is particularly helpful for netbooks - running Windows 7 on a netbook with 1GB of RAM is a surprisingly pleasant experience. You can't say the same for Vista - we'll be going into more detail on this soon in a separate article.