Posted on Thursday, March 19 2009 @ 19:30 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
ATI said yesterday that its unified Catalyst 9.3 driver should have higher performance in Windows 7 than Windows Vista, and ExtremeTech decided to put it to the test. You can check it out
over here.
Windows 7 is like the anti-Vista. There are lots of under-the-hood changes, but no completely new and drastically different driver models. WDDM 1.1 is a minor change to the display driver model, so ATI and Nvidia should have an easier time making sure their products are at least as stable and as fast as they are in Vista.
Recently, ATI announced that its monthly driver updates will include Windows 7 drivers, well ahead of Win7's release. Nvidia just released new, better Win7 drivers this month, and promises more improvements to come. So where exactly are we at today, and how far do these two graphics giants have to go to make Windows 7 a better choice than Vista for gamers?
The reporter concludes ATI is definitely ahead of NVIDIA at this moment in time, the ATI Catalyst drivers for Windows 7 perform really well. In some cases ATI Radeon HD cards are 5-10 percent faster in Windows 7 than Vista, which is really promising.
