What do you think of Windows 7 Gaming

1. yes because it has the most compatibility with games and programs and has dx11 which xp cannot use
2. I don't know. so far it offers no special treatment for gaming as of yet.
3. TBH i like win xp due to its lightness, but win7 serves a gaming purpose.
4. Because vista has alot of services that most people didnt use, most of which was bloat ware and slowed computers down. the only advantage that vista gave of xp at the time was dx10, so games like halo: combat evolved was unplayable on xp till the modified file came out.
5. No people still use xp, theres no real point on moving to win7 unless you need something that win7 offers.
6. because they either dont have the funds as of right now to switch most likely, or they enjoy the games they have access to. XP is much less demanding on computer memory and hdd than win7 is. if you play dx9 games and below, theres no real reason to switch over to win7.

Windows 7 is great for games. It also allows more memory then XP did(16 gigs for the homer premium version vs 4[more often 3-3.5 usable] gigs for all 32 bit versions of xp.)


Just cause 2 loads slower under 8, but plays fine. Performance seems similar.


Windows 7 works very well for me 


No clue to be honest I think too many OEMs sole Vista systems without sufficient memory. I got Vista for a system with 8 gigs of ram and NEVER had issues with the operating system it self. I found Vista was far better at using multiple cpu systems then XP.

Many users also confused Vista's program caching as wasted memory when it was all still available for use, just that the OS had pre loaded your most used apps into memory to give you a faster load(Windows 7 and 8 do this too). So it looked like ALL memory was in use, but it was not. Hell windows 8 is caching 11 gigs of stuff in memory as I type this.

I am also not going to lie, it took forever for video card makers to get caught up with new drivers(9 months with a 8800GTX that just did not work right, good thing my ati card worked to get me past this time. At first I blamed Vista too, but clearly it was not). so you could have had lots of crashing if you adopted to early.


yes and no. MS does not support it with the latest versions of IE and will slowly support it less and less, but many XP computers are still in service(my old lappy has XP and that it what it will have till the day it catches fire).


Early on XP showed slightly better performance in games. This makes sense as an older OS uses less resources. Some games just did not like Vista


The final Windows 8 should be the same or better. I hope better Windows 8 still has some minor bugs.

I did not notice any large FPS drops(certainly not 10fps) with Vista, but Aero may have been less optimized, but you can always shut it off to test.

yes, win7 got optimized DX, and got DX11, and has more advanced options of controlling the windows more than XP whiich is good for gaming.


M$ changed most of the file systems to better, and thats good for performance and might effects gaming under it, and also i've checked benchmarks and test and the results was games got better fps and games got worse in fps and that ofc that also depends on game engine how to deal with the OS, besides win8 still under development and updates and might get better.


mostly for DX11 and Aero theme  , and its massive support from other companies since its beta release, win7 is just an upgraded and modified vista.



to be honest i didnt hate vista, i was so excited about it since the beta, because of the tons of new things that xp didnt have, they put lot of new services and windows became more advanced, and all that needed more rams and a faster pc and software companies (drivers mostly) needed time to support it and thats why ppl hated it.


its not dead yet, but it is dying, M$ has its end support for their products as shown here for xp, and game companies started to work massively on DX11, and more than 20% of xp users switched to win7 cause of DX11 and 50% switched cause of performance and new OS, and i can say also next year or soon with new consoles that support DX11 game companies will focus on updating graphics and put new techs and that effects on PC gaming which is a good effect since windows vista/7/8 has the common thing which is the DX11.



that question got lot of answers, i can specify with depends on gamers budget and comfortably with using new OS, and fear of facing problems.

You guys have all given me some good answers. dudewitbow gave me a good answer on the windows 8 side of things.

Thanks for your opinions

Where do you see 32-bit mentioned? 64-bit is explicitly stated. So 16GB vs 4GB RAM is no issue. Besides, there are not many games with 64-bit binaries, so more than 4GB (ok....maybe 8GB with caching) has no benefits.

And I keep stating: 4GB for 32-bit Windows is SW limitation. The CPUs can access up to 64GB in 32-bit mode since 1995 (see PAE, which is optional for 32-bit and required for 64-bit). 4GB is a 32-bit app limitation for other reasons, unrelated to physical RAM.

Posting from Windows Vista here. First of all, dunno why you got such a slowdown using vista in your benches, that shouldnt happen. If you google for more benches youll see its pretty much the same as the others   Ive tried windows xp, vista and seven on this very machine, to check the difference in applications. Im part of Msft MSDNAA program so i have access to all their OSes freely. (Windows 8 is "install - see if its still crap - corroborate expectations - remove")

Back to subject, after much testing i saw the fps difference in games among the three is minimal to nonexistent. I tested FarCry, Crysis, Half life 2, MW4, Fallout 3 and a couple other, mainly comparing Vista and 7. Especially for newer games, which are more taxing, there's no practical difference. So I can only see DirectX support as the deal braker for games, XP for DX9, Vista for DX10, and 7 for DX11. My pc has an i3-2100 and 8gb ram, though an old 9800gt - which is DX10 for which Vista had all the support I needed. I prefer the looks of Vista, and after a big "why not?" i went for it.

I think which of these OSes you choose for gaming is not gonna matter much in terms of performance, but it will in terms of support for newer features such as DX10-11. Thats it! So..



I think it is: Latest technologies, good OS resource optimization.



They say it will eat up less RAM. But even a half a gb difference, going up or down on consumption, wouldnt really matter if you have 4gb+ on your system. So the answer is no, it will probably be very much the same as 7.



You're implying everybody likes 7 there. But i do, so I wont complain   There is one very notorious improvement on 7 that i miss sometimes, and I have to say it, Windows 7 is best for Multitasking. I remember the many years ago when on Win98 you would copy a 200mb file to some place on the disk, then try to open anything else and the PC would just freeze completely until the transfer is done. If not crashing the whole OS lol. Then on XP, you could keep working while doing CPU-Disk intensive workloads in parallel but the interface and programs would still annoyingly slow down and maybe 'stutter' when doing so. Vista was a massive improvement over XP on multitasking, it feels light and fast whenever doing transfers, watching hd videos, browsing the net, etc simultaneously. BUT, its still not perfect and ocasionally slows down when doing very intensive workloads. On windows 7, that never happens. You can do 50 things at a time and the OS always seems light and responsive, which is one of the reasons Its better than any other  



The other posts have answered that question. Its a great OS, very similar to Win7, consumes slightly more ram but i personally think it looks great.



Around a third of internet users have XP, so no its not dead at all...



There could be a variety of reasons. Some may not afford the upgrade, others may have a DX9-only videocard so they "dont need" to upgrade. Windows 7 has been growing very fast, and is now the worlds 1st OS in terms of usage share, so i think its more the people who are upgrading than those who prefer not to.

64 bit XP had worse driver support for one thing(got to see this in person).
If you NEVER multitask or do anything but use the computer to game then yes 4 gigs is plenty.

Its a shame most games don't support 64 bit(it requires more work with more 32 bit users, so they do not bother).

The 4 gig limit is a part of the OS, whats your point. MS limits the home premium version of 7 to 16 gigs as well. It was a simple fact that XP with out its 64 bit version(that was a last ditch effort when compared to Vista/7/8) had support for less memory.

Why did you quote unrelated parts of a post again?

Best answer selected by wonder44.