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Sure, Windows 7 is “optimized” for gaming, but does it provide a real tangible gain over Windows Server 2008 R2 properly tweaked? The core of both operating systems are relatively the same, but I want to know what the difference is between the two in real-time.
For example you could set up a dual boot environment of Windows 7 64-bit and R2 using the same identical hardware and run an in-game benchmark (for example Crysis) to find out which operating system provides the greatest frame rates of that particular game.
I ran across this website of this person who pitted 64-bit Vista SP1 vs 64-bit Server 2008 SP1 and XP 64-bit to see what the frame rates were when running for certain games. On Half Life 2, Server 2008 provided 30 more FPS under the same exact settings and hardware over Vista. Battlefield 2 provided 14 more frames per second under Server 2008. I think it would be neat if some of us on the forum can set up a dual boot environment where we can test games under these conditions using a properly tweaked workstation. We could record our results in posts below describing the title the game, settings we used, and FPS results.
Example:
OS: Windows Server 2008 Enterprise 32-bit
Game: Battlefield 2
Settings: 1280X1024, High Settings
FPS: 62OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit
Game: Battlefield 2
Settings: 1280X1024, High Settings
FPS: 50What do you guys think of this idea?
3D game render performance is going to be hardware, game engine, and DirectX iteration specific; and some of my tests show that changing any one can ‘flip‘ results to favor a different Microsoft OS… Early this summer I ran Futuremark’s 3D benchmarks on x64 editions of: Windows 7, Server 2003, and Server 2008 R2. Previously I’d done this with the 32-Bit verison of Server 2003 Web and XP and found Server 2003 to turn substantially faster 3d performance then Windows XP. This time the results were odd and mixed generally giving Windows 7 small synthetic DirectX 9 & 10 performance leads over the other two Operating Systems but typically results were within the margin of error for the benchmarks.
Running real games however told another story, yielding more dramatic differences… I used three engines to try to get an idea what was going: Frostbite 1.5, id Tech 4, and Unreal Warfare 2.5… Sever 2003 was able to consistently run DirectX 9 games faster then Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2, and running DirectX 10 games Windows 7 was faster then Server 2008 R2… While Server 2008 R2 was slightly slower running Frostbite 1.5 (I didn’t have a formal benchmark to run at the time) the frame rates it turned were more consistent and less ragged then Windows 7.
I was quite formal in my testing paradigm, ran carefully ordered installations of each OS from Boot VHDs with identical service complements running, the game engines and benchmarks run from a separate drive so the tests would be consistent across all OS tests. Server 2003 was the exception as it couldn’t be run from a VHD (at that time — but now there’s a kludge that will allow this using GRUB), and Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 get a slight disk read performance boost when run from a Boot VHD.
As my tests were only to satisfy my own curiosity, and were very tedious to setup and execute, I was pretty bored with the whole procedure, anxious to reformat, and get a working installation and the tools I use for work installed before the weekend was over so I didn’t save anything or make any make pretty graphs. It might be fun to do this all again, and format the results for presentation with newer hardware, and with a someone partner testing a parallel generation and price point platform so both ATI and Nvidia hardware/driver 3D performance can be compared…
:geek:
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