Windows 7 Review: XP vs Vista vs 7 in 80+ Benchmarks

Posted 10/19/2009 at 12:00pm | by Will Smith

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Libraries

The other major new Explorer feature is Libraries. Libraries are simply data buckets (for lack of a better term) that can store content that’s similar in nature, but located in different places on the same computer, across a network, or in the cloud. Libraries are handy for organizing and collecting files in one place, because they appear to be normal folders to most applications.

For example, suppose your music is stored in the Music folder on your profile, but your wife’s music is stored in the Music folder in her profile. If you want to stream both collections of music using some sort of streaming software, you can either point it to both folder, or you could create a Library that includes both folders and then point your streaming application to that Library. Libraries become especially useful when you integrate them with your commonly used folders, network shares, and cloud services.

DirectX 11

The latest version of DirectX is more iterative than revolutionary, at least as far as gaming is concerned. However, it does bring some exciting new technology to Windows in the form of the general-purpose GPU computing API known as DirectX Compute.

Gaming

There are three important things to know about DirectX 11 if you’re a gamer. First, DirectX 11 is coming to Vista and Windows 7, but not XP. Second, DirectX 11 is backwards-compatible with DirectX 10-capable videocards, so games that require the new API will still run on older GPUs, although those older GPUs aren’t necessarily going to perform well. Third and finally, the feature likely to have the largest impact the soonest in DirectX 11 is hardware tessellation. Tessellation lets the GPU automatically fill in detail on certain types of meshes by procedurally generating more complex (and better looking) triangles to fill in the gaps in the source art. The upshot is simple: Objects that are curved will look better when you render them on a PC equipped with a DirectX 11-capable GPU. There are other DirectX 11 improvements that will enhance performance on DirectX 11 GPUs, but we don’t anticipate a visual leap on par with the jump from DirectX 9 to DirectX 10.

Compute Shaders: CPU-Like Functionality

General-purpose GPU computing (GP-GPU) allows developers—specifically, those outside of the gaming arena--to take advantage of the performance potential of today’s modern, massively parallel GPUs. Tasks like rendering frames of animated movies, converting RAW photos to TIFFs, encoding H.264 video, and scrubbing video can all be accelerated using GP-GPU technology.

Until recently, in order to take advantage of the computing power of your videocard, you needed to use apps that were specifically coded for the brand of GPU you owned. DirectX Compute (along with the competing OpenCL) aims to change that by providing a common interface for harnessing the power of whatever processors are in your system, be they from AMD, Intel, or Nvidia.

It remains to be seen which GP-GPU API developers will embrace, but the future for the technology is bright.

The HomeGroup

Since home networks first became commonplace, we’ve heard promises about Microsoft making the home networking experience better, easier, faster and safer. These are admirable goals, but connecting to a network share has been essentially unchanged since the days of Windows NT 4. Enter Windows 7. Now, instead of haplessly navigating a maze of permissions, share settings, and firewall boondoggles, if you want to share your files or printer with other networked PCs, you simply join a HomeGroup. And it’s as easy as typing in a password. Once you’ve created your HomeGroup, sharing files is as easy as right-clicking on a folder or file, clicking Share With, and selecting the option you want. You can exclude individual files or folders the same way.

The only complaint we have with HomeGroups concerns compatibility: Neither earlier versions of Windows nor Windows Home Server machines can join HomeGroups today.  

Touch

While Tablet PCs have been around for the better part of a decade now, Windows 7 is the first edition of the mainstream Windows OS to actively support touch. We haven’t had the opportunity to test it, because the hardware support is limited right now, but the OS will work with common touch and multi-touch gestures on machines equipped with the appropriate hardware and software.

What Isn’t In Windows 7

For the first time that we can remember, Microsoft has removed functionality from Windows. In Windows 7, previously core applets like Windows Movie Maker, Windows Photo Gallery, and Windows Mail are no longer part of the core OS. Instead, they’re part of a separate, optional download called Windows Live Essentials. We weren’t huge fans of these apps when they were part of the OS, and we don’t miss them now that they’re gone.