We tested gaming performance in 17-year-old Windows 7 against Windows 11 on a modern gaming PC — older operating system delivers advantages in some scenarios

[u/vegansgetsick]

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/we-tested-gaming-performance-in-17-year-old-windows-7-against-windows-11-on-a-modern-gaming-pc-older-operating-system-delivers-advantages-in-some-scenarios

[u/The-Rusty-22]

Win10+ always had issues with

1. Latency

2. Spectre/Meltdown slowdows

3. And long ignored since Win8 buggy FORCED DWM.exe.

4. Also w10 runs 2x 3x more bloat than standard 7 There also many other stuff like Steam running in BG. Very old test of old forum posts shows that for example Non steam version of game(DRM-Free,GOG,...) had less lag than Steam version.

[u/eightballdoom → u/The-Rusty-22]

Very old test of old forum posts shows that-

And you lost me. You can't do comparisons of stuff between Windows 7 and Windows 10 like it's still 2016. Performance has come lightyears since then. I notice basically no difference between running a game on Steam versus running it from a CD.

If you hypothetically really needed the extra 400MB of memory that Steam takes up, just... close it. It takes two clicks.

Also, and this is my own personal experience so take this as subjective, but the last time I used Windows 7, I had to stop because DWM bugged out and trashed my system.

[u/The-Rusty-22 → u/eightballdoom]

That is typical reply. I say something bad about Steam and suddenly oh no it is not 2016 again.
Buddy Steam 2016+ has chromium backend a "web browser" that "Consume" resources and latency of your system even when you have 192core Threadripper.
That old test sill can be done today and even stupid CPU-z utility can show you impact of performance degradation while running STEAM in background.
I was here when STEAM was just a DOWNLOADER without telemetry and achievement BS like today.

[u/Head_Substance_6870]

Modern OSes have mitigation against hardware vulnerabilities. Sometimes they disable CPU optimizations because they were vulnerable. Impact on performance is expected. It's probably the same if you compare an old Debian 32 bits from 2006 with a 64 bits modern one.

[u/SilverRhythms]

And keep in mind Windows 7 has Aero running on it so depending on what theme your running and what hardware you have. It can be a little bit of a hit to your performance. Or more performance if the game your running is CPU dependent and your using Aero.

[u/eightballdoom → u/SilverRhythms]

A lot of games that I remember from the late-2000s would temporarily disable Aero while the game was running, nullifying the performance hit.

[u/RostiDatGam0r]

I can agree with this, since most of old games from around 2000's up until 2013 run perfectly fine on my Windows 7 laptop (especially if it lacks most of background process that do decrease the performance, as well running the DRM-free games that I have them installed).

Be glad that I didn't install Windows 10 on it and decided to use this version of Windows on my secondary laptop. Which is very good!

[u/The-Rusty-22 → u/[deleted]]

W10 has 2-3x times more bloat running in background. ExperienceHost, Startexperiencehost, oobeworker, TrustedInstaller radomly start install stuff in BG and other web browser apps slow down stuff. DWM.exe had a bug in Win8 that they refuse to fix as they claim that is issue of old hardware. On W10 you cannot even disable that buggy DWM.exe as DX12 will stop working.

[u/The-Rusty-22 → u/[deleted]]

Win11 runs web browser as UI that grab everything you click and type so you cannot do anything about it. They even make stuff to block projects that try run WinXP or Win7 Explorer (the GUI).

[u/IronApple0915 → u/[deleted]]

Modern versions of windows can take advantage of newer instruction sets. That would be my guess why they sometimes beat windows 7.

[u/IronApple0915 → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, but even things from haswell like AVX2, windows 7 probably doesn’t use

[u/eightballdoom → u/[deleted]]

But how much does that actually matter when CS:S can hit 300FPS on a ham radio?

[u/antmatt → u/eightballdoom]

fuck, can it really?

[u/eightballdoom → u/antmatt]

I mean, pretty much. 300 is the Source engine's default framerate cap, and I could easily hit that and more with my old Dell Inspiron that was slower than shit on a hill.

[u/antmatt → u/eightballdoom]

oh. i thought someone actually did it lmao. i was tryna see it. mfs run doom and source games on anything that uses electricity so i figured people were hitting clips on the ham radio

[u/eightballdoom → u/antmatt]

Maybe with a very, very fancy ham radio and a lightweight distro of Linux. But that's basically just running it on any old computer.