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

Will Smith — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:00:00 -0500

Finally, Microsoft releases a successor worthy of Windows XP

For the Windows faithful, it’s been a tough eight years. With the launch of Windows XP in 2001, we thought we were poised on a brink of a new world of NT-based goodness—but two years and uncountable exploits later, the future of Windows was grim. Facing a never-ending torrent of new ‘sploits, worms, and trojans, Microsoft fired back with the single greatest operating system update of all time—Service Pack 2. In the single fell swoop of SP2, Windows XP went from Swiss cheese to secure, and once again we were poised to enter the promised land with… (wait for it)… Vista.

Of course, we all know how Vista turned out. Haunted by poor performance in everything from games to disk access to networking, Vista is widely considered to be Microsoft’s biggest failure. Nonetheless, Vista laid the groundwork for a host of new technologies, all absolutely vital to pushing Windows into the 21st century. Vista’s new, modern driver architecture was designed to move core functionality from the kernel (where any instability can bring down the whole system) to user space—an absolutely necessary development. Likewise, Vista’s proper enforcement of permissions for both users and applications enhanced security, even though UAC remains very annoying. And once vendors fixed their driver flaws and Microsoft squashed some underlying bugs, Vista morphed into an entirely workable operating system, even if we still wouldn’t describe it as “good.”

So, as 2009 draws to a close, we find ourselves testing another new Microsoft OS: Windows 7. Building on the now-mature technologies introduced with Vista, but with a renewed focus on performance and ease-of-use, Windows 7 seems poised to succeed where Vista couldn’t. We’ve finally received a final build of Win7, and have run it through the wringer in both the Lab and in the real-world. Here’s what we found.

New Features

While support for new hardware and improved security are perfectly valid reasons to upgrade your OS, the sexiest benefits of an operating system upgrade are all the new features. Indeed, from a completely revamped user interface to brand-new features designed to make organizing and sharing your files easier, Windows 7 delivers much more than some new wallpaper and a different color Taskbar. (Though there are lots of new wallpapers.)

User Interface Enhancements

The most obvious changes from previous versions of Windows to Windows 7 can be found in a redesigned user interface. Sure, much of the interface remains the same, but Microsoft has completely overhauled key elements, starting with the Taskbar.

The New Taskbar

After 14 years of nothing more than cosmetic changes, Microsoft’s redesign of the Taskbar combines the pure window organizing power of the classic Taskbar with the application-launching, multi-purpose convenience of Mac OS X’s Dock. In addition to showing the applications that you currently have open, the new Windows 7 Taskbar also hosts shortcuts to your most commonly used applications. Click a shortcut when the app is running, and it brings the most recently used window to the foreground. Click the same shortcut when the app is closed, and it will launch the app.

But that’s not all. Drag a file onto a shortcut in the Taskbar, and Windows will open the file using that app. Hover your mouse over a running application’s icon, and it expands to show live thumbnail previews of all of that app’s windows, floating just above the Taskbar. Mouse over a thumbnail, and Windows will bring that particular window to the foreground. You can even close individual windows from the thumbnail previews.

For anyone who regularly finds himself with more than 10 windows open, the new Taskbar is a dream come true.

Jump Lists

Another core enhancement to the OS comes in the form of Jump Lists. In short, Jump Lists put frequently used files in a convenient menu that’s a simple click away from the shortcut icon on the Taskbar or on the Start Menu. Apps that support Jump Lists will display the list when you right click on the shortcut, or when you left-click and drag the mouse up away from the Taskbar. Additionally, some apps will automatically populate their Jump List with files you recently opened.

New Shortcuts

Along with the redesigned UI elements comes a whole new world of user-interface shortcuts. There are really too many to get into here, but the best of the new shortcuts allow you to maximize a window by dragging it to the top of the screen, minimize it by dragging it to the bottom, maximize to half your screen by dragging it to either edge, or (our favorite) minimizing all other windows by shaking the one you want to focus on. Furthermore, enhancements to alt+tab let you immediately find lost windows, and you can use the Windows key and numbers 1 through 0 to launch the first ten shortcuts on your Taskbar. And when those apps are already open, you can cycle through multiple windows by pressing the app’s keyboard shortcut again.

Explorer Enhancements

Windows Explorer also receives some much-needed love. The changes since Vista are relatively minor, but they serve to make the left-column of Explorer the quickest way to navigate to any folder on your hard drive, network, or even in the cloud. Furthermore, you can arrange the different categories in any way you want, quickly add special folders to the Favorites section, and even hide sections you don’t use.

The other main place to access the file browser is the shortcut bar on the right column of the Start Menu. In Windows 7, there are more folders that you can choose to display there, including Downloads and Recorded TV. However, you still can’t place any folder you choose in one of those precious slots.

We Hope You Like the Ribbon

The controversial Ribbon, which replaced traditional menus and shortcut bars in Office 2007, is prominently featured in Windows 7. In the applets that ship with the OS, you’ll see the Ribbon featured prominently.

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.

Improvements from Windows Vista and XP

In addition to shiny new features, many legacy features from Vista and XP have been tweaked, touched up, or otherwise improved upon.

Searching Is Fundamental

Vista was the first Windows version to have deep search features built right in. Does anyone use them? Not enough people do, and so our best advice we can give to the new Windows 7 user is to embrace search. As in Vista, you can use search to launch apps without removing your hands from the keyboard, to find specific settings in the control panel, and to parse through your email, document folders, and even shared folders on your network. Getting started with search is easy—just mash the Windows key on your keyboard and type your query. The Windows 7 search is speedier than Vista’s was at launch, and finally allows searching of network shares, assuming they’re part of either your HomeGroup or indexed on the server side.

Better UAC

User Account Control was one of the most maligned new features to appear in Vista, and for good reason. We have all been extremely annoyed by UAC’s incessant prompts for permission to do anything that requires administrator access. Worse yet, sometimes Vista will prompt multiple times for the same action. All that said, UAC has produced Microsoft’s desired effect: In situations where malware has infected Vista PCs, UAC helps contain those infections to a limited portion of the hard drive, typically a single user profile.

In Windows 7, Microsoft exposes multiple levels of UAC notification control, and has greatly toned down the number of notifications you’ll typically see. Whether you want granular control over the actions of each and every application you install, or simply opt not be bothered, you can choose the setting that’s right for you.

UI Speed

Many of the behind-the-scenes improvements to Windows 7 were designed to do one thing: improve the responsiveness of the user interface. Whether it’s the result of core kernel improvements that boost the performance of multi-threaded apps on multi-core CPUs, or improvements in the way frequently used applications are cached in memory, the new OS feels snappier in almost every way. Apps seem to load faster, and dialog boxes appear and disappear faster. In general, we found ourselves spending less time waiting for the PC than we do in XP, Vista, or OS X. While we attempted to measure some quantitative benchmarks on app load times and other UI speed tests, we found it very difficult to measure reliably. However, when surveying dozens of users about their Windows 7 experiences, one response was almost universal: Windows 7 feels faster.

Wallpapers

It seems a little goofy to talk about, but Windows 7 includes more awesome desktop wallpapers than any version of Windows we’ve ever tested. The included window dressing ranges from the standard plain-vanilla Windows logo background to awesome, inspired, and downright creepy images created by artists from around the globe. Windows 7 also includes a utility that automatically swaps your wallpaper at fixed intervals. Still missing, however, is a way to run different backgrounds on multiple monitor rigs.

Audio

We also have to give a nod to the polish that Microsoft gave to the audio control panel. Windows 7 handles multiple audio outputs much better than previous iterations of the OS, allowing you to designate your headphone output to communications software, while using your speakers for everything else. The OS will even detect when you’re using voice chat software, and automatically mute or lower the volume on other sound sources. We had some problems with games that included voice chat functionality triggering this feature, but it was relatively easy to fix.

Like Vista, Windows 7 lacks the APIs required to support older DirectSound 3D games. With most modern titles supporting OpenAL (which does work on Windows 7), the omission of 3D hardware sound support is more forgivable this go ’round than it was with Vista.

But it’s still not something we’re happy about.

Versions, Activation and 64-bit

Like Windows Vista, there are many versions of Windows 7 available. However, unless you’re an IT guy at a big company, you really only need to be concerned with four different editions: Starter, Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate. Yes, Microsoft has simplified the different versions of Windows that are available, but choosing the best OS for your needs still isn’t effortless.

The easiest way to look at the Windows 7 product family is to recognize that each version is superset of the version beneath it. For example, Home Premium includes all the features of Starter, but adds the Aero interface and Media Center. Professional, meanwhile includes all the features of Home Premium (and thus Starter), but a few features oriented toward business users.

Now, with that said, there are really only a few core features that would demand you buy one version over another.
For example, the main difference between Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Professional is that Pro includes the virtualized XP compatibility mode, the ability to back up your computer to a network drive, a Remote Desktop Connection server, and the ability to connect to corporate networks. Ultimate, meanwhile, includes all the features of Home Premium and Professional, but adds support for Bit locker drive encryption and the freedom to switch the OS between different languages.

So which version should you buy? We recommend that most home users buy Home Premium, unless you either run a domain controller inside your home, or you want to be able to use Remote Desktop to log into your computer from another PC. Once you choose your OS, you can be secure in the knowledge that each successively more advanced version includes all the features included in simpler versions.

Software activation continues to be a hassle for people who purchase Windows 7. We didn’t complain when Microsoft launched Windows XP, but we have grown increasingly irked the unnecessary hassles it creates. For example, upgrading a hard drive or videocard frequently requires a call to Microsoft’s phone activation line. While we recognize that Microsoft must protect its OS against piracy, we’re not fans of any anti-piracy technology that inconveniences paying customers more than the pirates that it’s designed to thwart.

Our final thought on Windows 7 SKUs concerns the eternal debate between 32-bit and 64-bit support. The debate is essentially moot, as all retail versions of Windows 7 include both 32-bit and 64-bit discs. What’s more, your activation key for Windows 7 is good for either a 32-bit install or a 64-bit install, so you can try out whichever version you’d like, without worrying that you’re locking yourself into a version of Windows that you may not want. That said, we’ll be running 64-bit Windows 7 on our machines, and expect most enthusiasts to do the same.

Performance

To assess Windows 7 performance, we spent more than 30 hours testing Windows 7 Professional x64 in a battery of benchmarks designed to measure application performance, network performance, disk performance, and finally, gaming. Our test rig was equipped with a Intel Core 2 Quad Q9770 Extreme processor, 4GB of DDR2 memory, a 1TB Barracuda 7200.12 drive, and an ATI Radeon 4890 videocard. To test gaming performance with both the ATI and Nvidia’s drivers, we used a manufacturer-overclocked GeForce GTX 285.

Applications

As you can see in our application benchmark chart, we saw wildly varying performance of different applications in Windows 7 x64, Windows XP x86 with Service Pack 3, and Windows Vista x64 with Service Pack 2. A few things really stood out, though. First, it seems that the hard drive performance problems that plagued early editions of Vista are solved once and for all in Windows 7. In our tests, Windows 7 was a few percent slower than XP SP3, but faster than Vista SP2.

APPLICATION BENCHMARKS

	Windows XP (x86)	Windows Vista (x64)	Windows 7 (x64)	Percentage Difference: XP to Win 7	Percentage Difference: Vista to Win 7
ProShow Producer (sec)	826	1166	848	-2.66%	+27.27%
Mainconcept Reference (sec)	1649	1657	1653	-0.24%	0.24%
Premiere (sec)	831	739	840	-1.08%	-13.67%
Photoshop (sec)	141	127	140	+0.71%	-10.24%
PC Mark 2005
CPU	9116	9076	8568	-6.01%	-5.60%
Memory	6459	6371	6463	+0.06%	+1.44%
HDD	8029	6782	7537	-6.13%	+11.13%
PC Mark Vantage
HDD	WNR	4657	4728	N/A	+1.52%

Best scores in bold. Our test rig uses a Intel Core 2 Quad Q9770 Extreme CPU, 4GB DDR2 RAM, 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 HD, and an ATI 4890 videocard.

Most of our application benchmarks measure either multi-threaded CPU performance (Main Concept, ProShow), hard drive performance (PC Mark Vantage), or a real-world mixture of the two (Photoshop, Premiere). In all of our application benchmarks, Windows 7’s performance was within a stone’s throw of XP.

It’s also worth noting that in several of our tests Vista was actually a big winner, thanks to performance enhancements that hit in Vista Service Pack 2.

Network

One of the main problems with Windows Vista prior to Service Pack 1 was poor network performance. Well, we’re happy to say that the days of waiting for files to copy across a network are done. Check the benchmarks and see for yourself—Windows 7 is stupid-fast at transferring files across a network.

NETWORK BENCHMARKS

	Windows XP (x86)	Windows Vista (x64)	Windows 7 (x64)	Percentage Difference: XP to Win 7	Percentage Difference: Vista to Win 7
File Transfer (small files) (sec)
Download	46.9	56.3	21.8	+53.52%	+61.28%
Upload	20.5	16.5	16.9	+17.56%	-2.42%
File Transfer (large file) (sec)
Download	46.2	4.3	4.1	+91.13%	+4.65%
Upload	4.9	4.6	3.9	+20.41%	+15.22%

Best scores in bold. Our test rig uses a Intel Core 2 Quad Q9770 Extreme CPU, 4GB DDR2 RAM, 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 HD, and an ATI 4890 videocard.

Games

To test gaming performance, we ran a mix of DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 benchmarks on both ATI and Nvidia hardware. It’s important to remember when checking these scores, you shouldn’t be comparing ATI to Nvidia and vice versa. Instead, you should compare ATI’s and Nvidia’s respective scores on the different platforms to see who has the best drivers for Windows 7.

GAMING BENCHMARKS - ATI

	Windows XP (x86)	Windows Vista (x64)	Windows 7 (x64)	Percentage Difference: XP to Win 7	Percentage Difference: Vista to Win 7
DX 10 Benchmarks
Far Cry 2 HQ (fps)	WNR	52.9	53.1	N/A	+0.38%
Far Cry 2 LQ (fps)	WNR	57.8	58.4	N/A	+1.04%
Crysis - Very High - no AA (fps)	WNR	31.4	31.4	N/A	+0.00%
Crysis - Very High - 4xAA (fps)	WNR	27.5	27.6	N/A	+0.36%
DX 9 Benchmarks
Far Cry 2 HQ (fps)	42	41.6	45.5	+8.33%	+9.38%
Far Cry 2 LQ (fps)	46.5	46	41.2	-11.40%	-10.43%
Crysis - High - no AA (fps)	47.7	44.4	41.6	-12.79%	-6.31%
Crysis - High - 4xAA (fps)	40	36.1	36	-10.00%	-0.28%
Call of Duty 4 (fps)	92.9	95.2	97.8	+5.27%	+2.73%

Best scores in bold. Our test rig uses a Intel Core 2 Quad Q9770 Extreme CPU, 4GB DDR2 RAM, 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 HD, and an ATI 4890 videocard.

In DirectX 10 benchmarks, both ATI and Nvidia chalked up almost identical scores in Vista and Windows 7. That’s to be expected, given that both companies are using a universal driver in Vista and Windows 7. That is, the driver in Windows 7 and Windows Vista are essentially the same.

However, everything changes when you get to DirectX 9 benchmarks. Depending on the benchmark, Windows 7 ranged from about 10% faster to about 10% slower than Windows Vista. What you gain in one benchmark, you lose in another. And, over the entire range of our DirectX 9 tests, everything ended up even.

GAMING BENCHMARKS - NVIDIA

	Windows XP (x86)	Windows Vista (x64)	Windows 7 (x64)	Percentage Difference: XP to Win 7	Percentage Difference: Vista to Win 7
DX10 Benchmarks
Far Cry 2 HQ (fps)	WNR	62.7	62.8	N/A	+.016%
Far Cry 2 LQ (fps)	WNR	69.5	68.6	N/A	-1.29%
Crysis - Very High - no AA (fps)	WNR	30.1	30.1	N/A	+0.00%
Crysis - Very High - 4xAA (fps)	WNR	25.6	25.7	N/A	+0.39%
DX 9 Benchmarks
Far Cry 2 HQ (fps)	47.5	50.5	46	-3.16%	-8.91%
Far Cry 2 LQ (fps)	52	46	51.4	-1.15%	+11.74%
Crysis - High - no AA (fps)	50.7	49.5	49.5	-2.37%	+0.00%
Crysis - High - 4xAA (fps)	39.7	39.7	40	+0.76%	+0.76%
Call of Duty 4 (fps)	121.4	114.9	116.9	-3.71%	+1.74%

Best scores in bold. Our test rig uses a Intel Core 2 Quad Q9770 Extreme CPU, 4GB DDR2 RAM, 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 HD, and a Nvidia Geforce GTX 285 videocard.

For gamers, especially those currently using Windows XP, there’s a strong reason to upgrade to Windows 7. You may sacrifice a little performance in some games, but you’ll gain some in others, and you’ll have the ability to run DirectX 10 and 11 apps in their full glory, which will never be possible in Windows XP. We’re also confident that both ATI and Nvidia will continuously work to improve gaming performance in the future, as both companies have for every other new OS Microsoft has released.

The Verdict

Whether you’re coming from XP or Vista, Windows 7 offers a massive leap forward in usability, security, and support for new hardware and technology, especially for enthusiasts and power users. For anyone who regularly keeps many windows open at once time, the new Taskbar is worth the price of admission alone. For XP users, the security improvements are equally worthy of praise, while Vista users will be thrilled with the much improved, much less annoying UAC. Add in support for new hardware technologies, more new features, and the kernel improvements that should allow you to get more from your multi-core CPU, and Windows 7 becomes a tidy, compelling package to all Windows users.

Best of all, the new OS simply feels faster than Vista or even XP. As one editor said after a session testing the OS, it’s the best of both worlds—the user interface speed of XP and the features and security of Vista and more. That’s something to be lauded.

We’re happy with the changes Microsoft has made to Windows 7 as a product line. By making the more expensive SKUs supersets of the less capable versions, choosing the right version of Windows 7 is as simple as it was picking a version of XP (and exponentially easier than navigating the almost incomprehensible SKU structure for Vista). However, we still don’t see any benefit to Microsoft fielding more than two SKUs of Windows—without Aero, Starter edition is unnecessarily crippled, as it was with Vista. Who should buy Ultimate? In our eyes, no one should, unless you desperately need multiple language support in the UI. As with Vista, the extras in Ultimate don’t justify the added cost. For most of our users, we’ll simply recommend Windows 7 Professional if you need to connect to a domain or use XP mode, and Home Premium if you don’t.

As with Vista and XP before it, we remain unhappy with the activation process. As enthusiasts who frequently upgrade hardware and reinstall our operating systems, we’re tired of being punished with increasingly obnoxious reactivation processes. As paying customers, we shouldn’t have to get on the phone every time we need to reinstall Windows, whether our behavior triggers piracy flags or not. The music industry has already figured out that the best way to drive your paying customers to thievery is to treat them like thieves. Hopefully, Microsoft will get the memo between now and the launch of Windows 8.

Moral objections to product activation aside, Windows 7 is unquestionably the best version of Windows that Microsoft has ever released, and is the true successor to Windows XP. If you’re an enthusiast or power user, Windows 7 is well worth your money, whether for an upgrade today or on your next new machine.

We expect that this new OS will mark the beginning of the end for Windows XP, which is highest praise we can give the latest version of Windows.

Windows 7

Unquestionably the best version of Windows to date. Snappier UI and kick-ass new features.

Activation process continues to suck. Multiple product SKUs create unnecessary confusion.

Microsoft

Nero LiquidTV

Will Smith — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:30:37 -0500

It's not like TiVo for your PC, it is TiVo for your PC

To long-term TiVo users, most other personal video recording solutions, whether they’re PC-based or provided by your cable or satellite provider, just fall short. TiVo takes a complex task—recording your favorite TV shows for later playback on-demand—and makes it simple, easy, and even fun. As officially licensed TiVo software for your PC, LiquidTV delivers all the TiVo features you know and love in a PC-friendly software package.

The LiquidTV package comes with the software, a year of complimentary TiVo service (the annual fee thereafter is $40), a standard TiVo remote, a TiVo IR receiver/blaster combo, and a Hauppauge USB ATSC/NTSC/QAM combo TV tuner. The software requires a relatively unobtrusive activation process, although if you want to move it to another machine after you’ve activated, you’ll probably need to make a phone call.

Nero's TiVo-in-a-box includes a TiVo remote, a USB TV tuner, an IR receiver/blaster, and the software you'll need to get TiVo on your PC!

While the package came with only a single tuner, you can use up to four tuners with the software. Setup was relatively simple, and unlike other PVR software we’ve tested, the TiVo software allows you to easily configure multiple sources with different channel information. For example, we set up the USB Hauppauge tuner with local over-the-air HD channels, then connected a cable box to an ATI TV Wonder 650, using the IR blaster to change channels. We had no problems getting the software working with over-the-air HD or connecting the PC to our cable box, but we couldn’t get the unencrypted QAM support, which our cable provider says is not supported for our area.

All the standard TiVo functionality is present, and shows that you record on other networked Series 2 or higher TiVos in your home can be shared with each other. The LiquidTV software also adds features that users of dedicated TiVo boxes might not be familiar with—auto-convert for portable devices and record-to-DVD. In the options for every show you watch, you can choose to automatically convert recorded programs to versions for your PSP, iPod, or other portable media player after the show is finished recording. For obsessive archivists or frequent travelers, this feature can be a real boon.

Longtime TiVo users will find the LiquidTV interface eerily familiar.

As with other PVR software, the big problem for home users is high-def content. Viewing over-the-air ATSC HD content is easy and free, but the HD equivalent for cable, QAM, is poorly supported and works only for basic cable stations. There’s no way for end-users to get HD signals from their cable or satellite providers into their PVR box.

Beyond that, the software includes all the limitations of dedicated TiVo boxes. Content from certain channels is “protected” from transcoding or burning to DVD. Currently, the only affected channel is HBO.

As the TiVo service for set-top boxes costs around $12 a month, $100 for Liquid TV is a great deal, especially if you have a dedicated PVR or home server machine running that you can install it on. (We’d love to pair this software with an always-on Home Server machine, but the Home Server OS isn’t officially supported.) We love the TiVo service, which makes this our new favorite PVR software solution for the PC.

MotionDSP vReveal

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:00:30 -0500

Look out CPU, the GPU finally gets a killer app

What do a surveillance camera and the average home videographer have in common? Surprisingly, a hell of a lot—it’s just the subject matter that’s different.

One takes really poorly exposed, fuzzy, low-res videos of a gas station clerk getting a pistol jammed in his face, and the other takes really poorly exposed, fuzzy, low-res videos of a kid kicking a soccer ball or blowing out birthday candles.

Apparently, that’s the logic MotionDSP used when it decided that its $10,000-per-license, super-fancy video algorithms could not only be used to help the police catch carjackers, but also clean up the video of little Timmy’s birthday, too.

We’re not kidding. MotionDSP’s algorithms were developed to help resolve license plate numbers from video by analyzing multiple frames before and after a frame. By using the additional data to reassemble one sharp frame, MotionDSP’s algorithms are able to pull out far more detail than you would think possible.

vReveal cleans up messy video in a snap.

MotionDSP’s consumer app, vReveal, features a cleaning algorithm to remove pixilation, grain, and compression artifacts, along with a sharpening filter, auto contrast, and lighting and stabilization enhancements. The app also offers a resolution doubler, but alas, it’s only available for very low-resolution video (a forthcoming pro version will likely support higher resolutions.)

The results are fairly impressive. The vReveal app is able to clean up bad video far better than what you can do with consumer video editing packages and it does it very quickly, too, thanks to its GPU support. The app uses Nvidia’s CUDA platform to tap the GPU’s wealth of parallel processors to process video far faster than you could with any current CPU. We tested vReveal on this month’s monster rig from Maingear and a single GeForce GTX 285 gave us a 2x to 4x performance boost over the overclocked 4GHz Core i7-975. SLI support is not currently available because of a limitation with CUDA, the company says, but MotionDSP expects to have a work-around to fix that problem and will make it available in an update.

The app leverages Nvidia's CUDA as well as multicore CPUs.

The bad news is that vReveal will not support ATI’s Radeon HD series until OpenCL arrives. It’s also a bit of a letdown that vReveal is limited to standard-def material. The company says it’s optimizing performance for HD video and will have a free update for that as soon as possible.

One final problem: Output from the app is either in WMV or uncompressed AVI only. We can see WMV, but uncompressed AVI is too much for the average home user and would swamp his or her hard drive in no time.

Overall, we’re very impressed with vReveal, and while it’s a bit pricey for the video dilettantes, it’s a very handy tool for anyone who’s hot and heavy into video editing.

FEAR 2: Project Origin

Dan Stapleton — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:00:00 -0500

Chilling, but not so thrilling

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a proper FEAR game. After Monolith’s 2005 original, there were a couple of very mediocre expansions made by a different studio. When Monolith got the franchise back, we expected great things from its second outing; sadly, FEAR 2: Project Origin never really comes into its own.

As a shooter, it brings nothing new to the table—it tries to excite us with the exact same slow-motion combat system that made the first game captivating four years ago, but is simply not enough this time. Even though the enemies are a little more lifelike than most shooter foes, in that they can realistically vault over obstacles and blind-fire at you from behind cover, fighting legions of mercenaries and clone troopers gets old after a few hours. A few sections with agile wall-crawling enemies are the only engaging moments, but everything else is typical shooter fare—that includes sections where you drive a giant mech and mow down enemy soldiers like cutting grass. It’s been done before, and even though it looks pretty here, it’s nothing out of the ordinary.

What is unique to the FEAR franchise is its main antagonist, Alma, the understandably upset ghost of a little girl exploited by an evil corporation that used her DNA to create psychically controlled clone soldiers. Alma’s paranormal tantrum manifests as flashes of gruesome scenes, unsettling sound effects, eerie visions, and occasional physical confrontations that you have to melee-attack your way free of. Combined with some elaborate (though strictly linear) level design, FEAR 2’s haunted house atmosphere is its strongest trait.

It gets creepier still if you delve into the deep and twisted backstory, which exposes more of evil corporation Armacham’s experiments, revealed in files you find scattered around the levels. However, the actual characters you interact with are mostly two-dimensional, so you have to pay close attention and do a bit of hunting to get much out of the story.

Any respectable hardware will run FEAR 2 maxed out at a great frame rate, and it looks pretty good aside from the noticeably wooden facial animation. You might hit a few crashes to desktop (we had three), but you won’t lose much progress thanks to the frequent auto-save. However, it’s really annoying when games like this use a checkpoint save system without even giving us the courtesy of a quick-save.

When you’re done with the single-player campaign, you’ll be pretty much done with FEAR 2. There are several multiplayer modes, including deathmatches, Counter-Strike-style bombing missions, capture the flag, and control point capture games, but they’re all played as the cookie-cutter soldiers from the single-player game, with no interesting paranormal twists or even slow-motion combat. This won’t entice anybody away from their favorite online shooters.

FEAR 2 will be bought, played, mostly enjoyed, and thrown onto the shelf to be forgotten with the countless other pretty-good-but-not-great shooters. Like most horror film sequels, it’s good for a few scares on a dark night with the surround sound turned up, but not a whole lot more.

Mirror's Edge

Will Smith — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 08:45:00 -0500

We love parkour, but next time, please forgo the combat

Here’s the thing about Mirror’s Edge: It’s 85 percent awesome, and we’re as surprised as anyone that the part that’s awesome is the first-person parkour. The running, jumping, and climbing bits are utterly engaging and even transcendent. There’s something liberating about leaping fearlessly from rooftop to rooftop while fleeing from a nebulous anti-freedom force. Unfortunately, for every high you get while soaring through the sky, there’s a painful low in the form of a combat sequence.

And therein lies the rub. The rooftop chases, where the designers were free to build many-pathed courses through the map, are sublime. By confronting the player with a constant stream of risk-vs.-reward decisions—do I take the risky jump to shave some seconds off my time, or the safe jump to avoid death?—and increasing your players speed as she successfully strings together long combos, the game is elevated from the run-along-a-path-on-the-rooftops experience it could have been into something emergent and amazing and wonderful.

And then you go inside. Moving into an office building or a sewer cuts down on the number of potential paths, but even that’s not so bad. The game really falls apart when you stop running from the cops—as an early loading screen tip advises you—and have to start fighting them. Later in the game, you have to disarm and disable your ever-present pursuers in order to open the path forward. This wouldn’t be so bad, except the combat system is maddening at best. While DICE managed to make a spectacular first-person jumping and climbing game, it hasn’t broken the curse of first-person melee combat—we’ve never played a first-person game with good melee combat, and Mirror’s Edge is no exception.

Were melee combat not required to progress in Mirror’s Edge, the game would receive a much higher score. Were melee combat excised from the game entirely, Mirror’s Edge would have undoubtedly received the Kick Ass award.

Premiere Elements 7.0

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:59:25 -0500

Our love affair with Premiere Elements is just about over

Get Robert Stack on the phone! In what could be the greatest tech unsolved mystery since the disappearance of Intel’s Tejas, someone has kidnapped Premiere Elements 5.0 and 6.0!

Just kidding. There’s no crime here unless you believe that it’s flat-out wrong for Adobe to jump from version 4.0 to version 7.0 just to ensure that Premiere Elements matches version numbers with Photoshop Elements 7.0.

One thing we hoped for that’s definitely not present: three full upgrades’ worth of new features and improvements. Adobe continues to use its dumbed-down interface, which we initially viewed with disgust. Oddly enough, the more we’ve used it, the more forgiving we’ve become; we’ve grown quite fond of the newb-friendly front end, despite the fact that it’s basically unchanged. The menus and titling in the consumer video editor continue to be top-notch, as well.

Changes to the program include AVCHD editing support, which we welcome, and the addition of wizard-like features, some good, some so-so. InstantMovie, for example, allows you to easily turn a bunch of clips into a movie, parsing the best clips and adding transitions and effects for you automatically. Similar features have been a big disappointment to us in the past and InstantMovie isn’t a noticeable improvement. The pain of being forced to watch someone else’s home video isn’t lessened just because it’s automatically dressed up with transitions, filters, and a soundtrack. On the other hand, SmartSound makes creating soundtracks a snap. It includes some free music, or you can add your own MP3s to create copyright-violating home movies. Our favorite wizard is the SmartTags feature, which mitigates the tedium of organizing your clips. After you import clips, it scans them for close-ups, crowds, small groups, blurry images, shaky shots, and even focus problems. It’s not perfect and it lacks actual facial recognition, but it does help if you have a lot of footage to wade through.

Our biggest problem with Premiere Elements is that it suffers a host of problems (both minor and major). The first glitch occurred when we were trying to capture HDV footage via FireWire from a Canon HV10. The app’s preview screen would simply stop showing the preview footage. The content would capture, but we could not watch it as it was captured. OK, not a show stopper. More serious was our inability to burn more than one hour of HD footage to a Blu-ray disc. The app would either hang or reboot Windows Vista 64-bit. And it’s not like we didn’t bring enough firepower. We tested using this month’s Gateway FX6800 (page 76), which was equipped with a 2.93GHz Core i7-940, Radeon HD 4870 X2, and 6GB of RAM. We checked online and others have reported problems getting lengthy high-def video to Blu-ray disc, as well. Only by tweaking OS settings were others able to complete their projects. For the record, we had no problems burning the same project at DVD resolution.

When we contacted Adobe, our rep initially said the app is limited to burning roughly an hour of high-def resolution video. Adobe then later claimed to successfully burn two hours of high-def with no problems. So what’s the truth? All we know is that our project burned when we edited it to 17 minutes but choked at 59 minutes. As Madden says, “Boom!”

As a sanity check, we loaded Cyberlink’s PowerDirector 7 on the same box, took the MPEG-2 HDV files and encoded and wrote a one hour, 15 minute Blu-ray disc without a hitch.

Our other issues with Premiere Elements go back to the roots of the program. Since it’s based on the DNA of Premiere Pro, its main purpose is to make videos from traditional DV, HDV, or AVCHD cams. Try to feed it weird exotic video codecs and it chokes. The program, for example, can’t do something as basic as handling MS-DVR files, which can be created by almost any Vista PC with a TV tuner. Given people’s growing interest in consuming, editing, and “mashing up” video from dozens of sources, developers with stronger codec portfolios, such as Corel and Ulead, will likely win out.

With sub-par codec support and problems burning to Blu-ray discs, it’s pretty hard to recommend Premiere Elements 7.0. Maybe version 11.0 will be better.

Fallout 3

Will Smith — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 21:15:58 -0600

No one makes a big open-world role-playing game like Bethesda. That’s what the Elder Scrolls games are famous for, and that’s what the company has brought to the post-nuclear-holocaust milieu of Fallout 3. The game takes you to the world outside Vault 101, the charred remains of the Washington D.C. metro area 200 years after the nukes flew. Truly, Bethesda has built an amazing world.

And this world is the star of the game. Fallout 3 is massive—closer to a single-player MMO than a traditional, linear single-player RPG. As you explore the Wasteland, which surrounds D.C., you’ll meet hundreds of people, many of whom have their own stories to tell, and find hundreds of locations to explore. These range from fully fledged towns to survivalist outposts to ammo caches to camps for the various factions that populate the land. As in Oblivion, you control your progress through the game. Should you choose to skip the main quest, you can explore the world and look for adventure, completing quests and reaping the rewards along the way.

The combat system is equally astounding. Fallout 3 lets you switch between the VATS and a real-time system that’s closer to what you’d find in a first-person shooter. In the real-time mode, you point your weapon at the target and fire. Hits are registered on different areas of the enemies’ bodies, doing different amounts of damage based on such factors as accuracy, movement speed, and environmental awareness. VATS mode lets you target and queue your shots at specific areas of the enemies’ bodies—legs, head, arms, torso, etc.—as well as increase the chance of a crit, which will do extra damage. The catch is that you can queue only a limited number of shots in VATS mode at once. Each VATS shot costs AP, which regenerates slowly over time. Successful players will end up using a combination of VATS and real-time combat. Both of which are very satisfying.

The world is astounding, there are dozens of side quests, and the combat is fun. Unfortunately, Fallout 3 is far from perfect. This may sound a bit whiny, but the main quest just doesn’t feel special. Part of the problem is that the side quests are universally of a very high quality. Still, we expect the main quest to deliver the most drama, excitement, and wonder in the game, and it doesn’t.

Our other complaints are more technical. The first is that the game has a very low level cap. While the level 20 cap ensures that our characters never became godlike, we reached the cap after only a few hours of play, which removed much of our opportunity for character advancement. The big problem, however, is stability. Fallout 3 crashes more than any other AAA title we’ve played in the last year. Were the game stable, it would undoubtedly receive a Kick Ass award. As it is, we can’t give it more than an 8.

Verbatim PhotoSave DVD

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:45:22 -0600

All it takes is an errant foot strike or a power spike and poof—you’ve lost gigabytes of photos and memories in a single hard-drive crash. Let’s face it, few of us ever actually take the time to copy those photos to a backup drive. And if you don’t do it, do you really think your mother-in-law will? Verbatim’s PhotoSave DVD aims to solve this problem with a solution that even your newbiest relatives can handle.

Each disc contains an executable that auto-launches once the disc is in a drive. The app is Forest Gump simple. You can order it to scan one drive or all drives for JPEGs. Once it’s found all the files, a button push will burn the files to the disc. If your files exceed 4.5GB, the app will span multiple discs. Once the backup is done, you’ll find the files neatly arranged in the same folders they were in on your hard drive, accessible from any DVD drive. A second option lets you import files directly from a digital camera that’s mounted as a drive in the PC. The software is based on SoftR’s Self Recordable Media technology. SoftR has other versions tweaked to back up Outlook files or your My Documents folder, or back up and encrypt these files as well.

The cheapskates in our office wondered why they couldn’t simply use their own blank DVDs to back up to after filling the first PhotoSave DVD. While we’re all for saving a few bucks, we don’t begrudge Verbatim the right to actually turn a profit on these discs. The company simply couldn’t make any money if you bought a single disc for $2. People who think otherwise would probably also like a new, crisply folded 10-dollar bill with each disc. It’s capitalism, get used to it.

By default, the disc backs up only JPEG files, but the app can be customized to also pick up videos and RAW files. If a backup fills only part of a single disc, you can continue to add files until the disc is full, but the same rule doesn’t apply when a job spans multiple discs. For example, in a three-disc backup that we performed, the third disc was only partially filled. When we tried to add additional files to the disc, the app no longer appeared on the third disc and there was no way to add files to it.

That’s a minor kvetch though. Overall, the software is dummy-proof. Is it for a power user? Probably not. Is it for a power user’s gramps? Hell yeah. At $10 for three discs or $15 for five, it’s one heck of a great gift—something the receiver will truly treasure after his or her hard drive implodes.

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Finally, Microsoft releases a successor worthy of Windows XP

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The Verdict

Nero LiquidTV

It's not like TiVo for your PC, it is TiVo for your PC

MotionDSP vReveal

Look out CPU, the GPU finally gets a killer app

FEAR 2: Project Origin

Chilling, but not so thrilling

Mirror's Edge

Premiere Elements 7.0

﻿Our love affair with Premiere Elements is just about over

Fallout 3

Verbatim PhotoSave DVD

Our love affair with Premiere Elements is just about over