AMD and Nvidia Support

All Windows 7 previews state that the new Microsoft operating system will be extremely successful and is almost guaranteed to become very popular. Hardware developers and manufacturers, including AMD and Nvidia, also work closely with Microsoft on developing new drivers for Windows 7. Just recently the leading players in the consumer 3D market announced the release of their unified ATI Catalyst 9.7 and Nvidia GeForce 190.38 drivers. They are especially interesting to us due to the fact that it is for the first time the graphics card drivers are claimed to support DirectX 11 API included with Windows 7.

I would like to point out that Catalyst Control Center 9.7 has been completely redesigned and improved. Instead of a confusing tree-like menu in the left panel, we see a logical tab system. And the control panel itself doesn’t use skins anymore that it is it looks very nicely integrated into the OS interface.

However, the Nvidia GeForce control panel interface for Windows 7 remained the same as for Windows Vista. It is pretty convenient although some owners of Nvidia based solutions still wish they could get back the option when all the settings could be adjusted from the corresponding tab in the device properties.

But we got extremely interested in checking out new ATI Catalyst and Nvidia GeForce driver versions not only because they were new and supported DirectX 11. First, it is extremely interesting to see how gaming graphics cards will perform in Windows 7, and second, ATI and Nvidia both claimed that the 3D performance could improve in Windows 7 as well. Here are some screenshots from the marketing materials that confirm this statement:

Screenshot from Nvidia's marketing materials

Screenshot from ATI's marketing materials

It seems to us that both companies are extremely optimistic about the possible performance gain: they believe that by simply upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7 can in some cases provide 10-20% performance boost and sometimes even more than that. Well, we have to check things out ourselves, we can’t just take everything for granted that is why we decided to undertake an investigation of our own. We used the officially available legal copy of the new operating system: Windows 7 RC1 installed onto our primary testbed.