Modern Warfare on XP, Vista... and Windows 7

I played a lot of Call of Duty after my blog entry from last week and had no lock-ups during gameplay. So it looks like I may have accomplished my first and primary goal which is to have a gaming machine that I can play games on with minimal lock-ups. But I still want a fairly stable gaming machine and I'm toying with the idea of eventually taking this all the way to a gaming machine powerhouse. But we'll see how many other problems I have a long the way before I make that decision. :)

I did read on Digg last week that Windows 7 was made available to the public through a free Release Candidate. Normally I would not install a version of Windows that was still under development, but I've heard that even in it's current state it' smore stable than Vista. Since I will need a 64-bit version of Windows to get more than 3gb of memory and since this is technically "free" until I think March of 2010 (don't quote me on that), I decided it was a perfect solution while I'm going through this process to save a few bucks. But obviously I wanted to do benchmarks to see if it's truly worth the difference or not... so I did.

I have two hard drives in my gaming machine, a 300gb hard drive that has Vista and Ubuntu 9.04 on it, and then a newer 500gb I installed Windows XP on since Call of Duty would play fairly smooth in XP and wouldn't lock up (while I had the 8800 gt/oc). So the obvious place to start was with Windows XP.

Windows XP

For all of these tests I went through the first level of Call of Duty 4... the one on the boat. (Note: It's early and I've been working on this since yesterday and my wife is about to start rushing me for a soccer game so bare with my unwillingness to look up specific information.) I made sure all the settings were the same on all tests I ran:

Playing through the first level of Modern Warfare Fraps registered an average FPS of 67.129, with the minimum FPS of 30 and a maximum of 159 (I was going to create a cool graphic for this but again I'm running short on time). That seems fairly decent under the circumstances... It wasn't choppy and of course it didn't lock up.

Windows Vista

So I hadn't reconfigured my game rating in Vista since I got the 4890 and it was currently sitting at 5.0. I decided to run it and see my new awesome rating and this was the results:

Hmmmm... Processor and Memory holding me back. oh well it's on the to-do list... Ok, so same thing, same level... Here's the screen shot:

I don't know how to tell if it's using Directx 10 from a settings standpoint. The only thing I *think* I notice in game is blurryness around your gun when you zoom in using directx 10. I think there's some nicer depth effects when you die as well if I recall correctly. The graphics themselves didn't appear to be just extremely different between XP and Vista (I'll post comparison shots later in this blog entry). I don't know if this should be expected or not but the average FPS for Vista was 54.7, with a minimum of 16 and a maximum of 114. That's a 12 frame difference between XP. Now - i didn't check running processes - but the only thing I use this machine for is gaming so the two should be fairly similarly equipped.

Here's a bit of important information - It locked up once. *BUT* it wasn't during game play, it was before the game ever loaded and clicking the .exe again started it right up without problems. I can tolerate that.

Windows 7

After downloading Windows 7 and creating the DVD Disc from the ISO I decided it made the most sense to install this on the hard drive where XP currently is. My main reasons behind it were that one, XP seems to have far less restrictions on the number of times it can be installed, and two, as I mentioned in my first blog entry I've already had to call Microsoft once to get a new code for Vista. And Ubuntu with Grep is installed on the second drive (I turn the two hard drives on and off in bios so they don't conflict with each other) so it just made the most sense. I must say it does look really nice and I ran into minimal problems installing it. Once I got my virus protection and everything on there (safety first!) I installed Modern Warfare on it. Then I ran my game rating:

So they've made a few changes in their rating system... Hopefully I can get this puppy up to a 5.9 in the end. Back to Modern Warfare... Screen Shot:

One interesting note - this one defaulted to "Small" on "Number of Corpses". Other than screen resolution it was the only change I made between all three Operating Systems. Average FPS in 7 was 53.051 with a minimum of 20 and a maximum of 114. So only slightly lower than Vista. Oddly enough (and I've read other people say this as well) it *does* feel like it runs smoother and may even look better. But I'm always concerned my rose-colored-geek glasses come on whenever I get new things so try it for yourself and give me your thoughts. No lock-ups, but I did have an unusual complication I think I remember having in Vista - multiplayer wouldn't start, no error message, no nothing. Doing some research the solution I found was... ready for this? plug in a microphone. So I did... and it worked.

Overall I think the games looked fairly similar. I wasn't just wow'd on any of them (or I should say, I was wow'd on all of them equally, cause the graphics in this game do look amazing). But as I did last time I'm not going to just leave it to my opinion... I have screen shots.

One thing I did just notice on the screen shots above is the level of shinyness on the front of the gun...

nothing real major there than I can tell...

Note - I decided not to compare this to the XBox version. For one - I don't know how to benchmark it. For two - I don't know how to screen shot it in a way I can get accurate comparisons. And three - the xbox just freakin' works and it looks great so why even include it. Plus as long as Halo 3 is only available on XBox 360 there's no chance of me putting it away anytime soon.

Next Week hopefully I'll have my new cpu and motherboard and hopefully I can pull off better ram too. Then the testing REALLY begins.