F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin

There is no breakthrough here. All graphics cards perform almost the same in Windows 7 and Windows Vista, and the slight results difference falls within the acceptable measuring error. Nevertheless, minimal performance of the Radeon HD 4890 is considerably higher in Windows 7. And I have to say that this increase is very stable and can be observed in all resolutions, although it is not high enough to ensure gaming comfort in 2560x1600.

Left 4 Dead

This game is based on Source engine and has built-in benchmarking tools that report no minimal performance readings.

GeForce GTX 295 is stably 4-5% faster in Windows 7, while GeForce GTX 275 speeds up by about 6%. At the same time, ATI Radeon barely benefits from the new Microsoft operating system. Only in 1280x1024 the average performance of the Radeon HD 4870 X2 increases by 11%, although the release notes for Catalyst 9.7 claimed a much more substantial performance improvement in high resolutions with enabled FSAA 4x.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky

To achieve playable speed in this game we disabled FSAA and such resource-consuming options as Sun rays, Wet surfaces and Volumetric Smoke. We used the Enhanced full dynamic lighting (DX10) mode and additionally enabled the DirectX 10.1 mode for the ATI cards.

We see no performance increase on transition to Windows 7, and in some cases the performance even drops, though not dramatically. The losses make no more than 2-3%. Only in 2560x1600 average performance of Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 drops down by 5%. The minimal performance in the latter case remains unchanged, so it doesn’t affect the gaming comfort at all.