Windows 7 experience scores strange behavior

[Colonel O'Neill]

Just wondering, anyone else seeing strange readings from the Windows Experience Index?

Mine says my Graphics subscore is 2.3, but my Gaming graphics score is 4.9.

:blink:

[MagicAndre1981]

Which graphics card do you have? Are you using the latest drivers?

[Colonel O'Neill]

It's a Mobile Intel 965 Express Chipset Family (Integrated laptop card)

It installed it's own driver when I installed 7 somehow. The device shows up as a Mobile Intel ® 965 Express Chipset Family (Microsoft Corporation - Prerelease WDDM 1.1).

I am able to play Doom 3 (10-20FPS), Crysis (3-10FPS), and CSS (20-40 FPS) on this card in Windows 7.

[steven4554]

There are new drivers available for your graphics chipset on the intel website for Windows 7, cause i don't your cpu supports both 32-bit and 64-bit, i will provide both weblinks below:-

32-bit Intel Driver - 64-bit Intel Driver

Hope this helps you.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Okay I installed those drivers, now Graphics is at 2.4 rather than 2.3. Gaming graphics is still 4.9.

Gonna go try a game now. EDIT: A few frames of improvement in Doom 3.

What is the relation between the two supposed to be? I'd think Gaming Graphics < Graphics...

Edited July 22, 2009 by Colonel O'Neill

[CoffeeFiend]

What is the relation between the two supposed to be? I'd think Gaming Graphics < Graphics...

Depends on the card. My Radeon 4670 under Vista x64 has a similar score for both, but my Radeon 3200's (780G chipset) under Win 7 has scores quite similar to yours (2.x and 5.x iirc -- the lowest being business, not gaming). My older card had similar ratings under Vista.

It looks perfectly normal to me.

Edit: updated the drivers on the Win7 box (Radeon HD 3200) with ATI's latest and refreshed the score:

Graphics: 3.6

Gaming Graphics: 5.0

1080p H.264 decode works perfectly good too, and same for GPU-accelerated apps (like Photoshop CS4). Not too shabby for onboard video on a $90 motherboard (even has DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort!)

[cluberti]

What is the relation between the two supposed to be? I'd think Gaming Graphics < Graphics...

The gaming graphics test measures the GPU horsepower (frames per second and speed/size of the GDDR on the card) for the most part, whereas the graphics test is specific to the capabilities of the specific D3D and DWM components that make up the Windows shell with Aero/Glass enabled, and how well the card performs under those specific APIs and routines.

Usually the gaming graphics score is lower (but close in numeric value) compared to the graphics score, but with some older cards, low and mid-tier versions of high-end cards, and most onboard Intel integrated video cards, the converse seems to be regularly true (the drivers are likely tweaked for being fast for gaming, but not robust in the full D3D/DWM feature set). Note you can see what the "Graphics" and "Gaming Graphics" tests score specifically on your box by running the following commands from an elevated cmd prompt:

"Graphics" test:

winsat dwmformal -v

"Gaming Graphics" test:

winsat graphicsformal -v

It's worth reiterating that while it might look odd at first, it's actually quite normal to see this.