What Makes Windows 7 Faster

My first impression of Windows 7? Feels a lot faster, even than my old XP installation (thanks to the negative press/opinions Vista suffered from, I stayed away). Then again, you can argue that everything’s more responsive because new Windows installs usually are.

But the tech-heads from Anandtech have the proof. With Windows 7, Microsoft overhauled how its OS renders multiple windows and interfaces. Seems the guys at Redmond have finally figured out how to transfer that load more to a PC’s graphics card, while minimizing the burden on the CPU and system memory.

WDDM [Windows Display Driver Model] 1.1 itself is not particularly impressive, but it’s what it allows that is… Microsoft has been able remove the copy of the texture from system memory and operate solely on the contents in video memory. As a result the memory consumption of Windows is immediately reduced, potentially by hundreds of megabytes.

But wait, there’s more!

Microsoft has also introduced some changes to GDI [Graphics Device Interface] that do not require new display drivers. Along with requiring a local copy of window textures, the GDI stack was locked so that only a single GDI application could access it at a time. The GDI stack has been rebuilt so that the lock is more or less removed. Multiple GDI applications can now issue commands to it at the same time, and this is all pushed off to the video card to be its problem.

Even with multiple windows open on my relatively weak XPS M1330 (with 128MB of dedicated video memory), I can quickly switch through apps via the revamped taskbar. What about you?

Read: Running Windows 7 and Vista or XP
Source: Windows 7: Release Candidate 1 Preview
All images courtesy of Microsoft