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Changed from Vista too W7..performance down.


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I haven't done any direct comparisons between the two OSes in regards to performance. I would have assumed that they would be fairly similar, especially since a number of drivers are interchangeable between the two OSes.

Here's some interesting benchmarks between XP vs. Vista vs. 7. I don't know if they correlate with what you have seen upgrading between Vista and 7 though (though the Vista and 7 versions are the 64-bit ones).

The Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) is used in both OSes and I'm not sure what changes may have occurred with Windows 7, but it has been upgraded to WDDM 1.1. I don't know if the WDDM 1.1 spec offers much of a change for 3D games. I wouldn't expect DirectX 11 / WDDM 1.1 support to make much of a difference in the drivers made for Windows 7 compared to Vista. Usually I expect a bit of a performance loss with newer OSes with newer drivers not being quite optimized yet. Over time they tend to get a bit better to where they may match the previous OS or exceed it in performance (depending on the architectural limitations).

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I'm not aware of any "optimizations" that can be done to the game code to accommodate the newest video drivers. Generally speaking that probably would NOT be a good idea since video drivers change so often and they change their own optimizations so frequently that it would be foolhardy to "optimize" for certain drivers. I don't think that there is anything in the new WDDM 1.1 specification that would really benefit game developers.

The issue is typically the video driver developers getting up to speed and optimizing for the new environment (WDDM 1.1 in this case). New environments can place further restrictions on the ability to optimize code (running in different 'rings', etc.). I don't know what the case is for WDDM 1.1, but it may just take awhile before the drivers are fully up to speed.

Since CMSF and other CMx2 games have to run on multiple OSes, I'm not sure what optimization can be done. Since these games use the OpenGL API, I'm not sure how much a difference the WDDM 1.1 spec makes for that API. It would most likely affect DirectX, but it could cause overall performance issues for video cards since most of the WDDM 1.1 spec seems geared towards the desktop 3D/features and multimedia playback (rather than 3D game performance). It's possible that some of the improvements have additional overhead that may suck some of the performance available to 3D applications (I don't know - that is strictly a guess).

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