That said, it's clear that ATI is well ahead of Nvidia at this moment in time. It's rare that ATI's current cards run a game slower in Windows 7, and when they do the difference is slight. More importantly, there are lots of situations where Windows 7 is actually 5–10% faster than Vista.

With maybe six months or more before Win7's release, that's a great place to be. ATI's old Win7 drivers had a few compatibility issues with a handful of games, which seem to be addressed in this new Catalyst 9.3 release.

Nvidia is in good shape for this point in time, but still has some work to do. While quite a few games run the same under Vista and Win7, it's rare that any of them are faster, and there are some cases where a game will run considerably slower. Rumor has it that Nvidia plans another big Windows 7 driver update "soon" that brings their cards up to performance and feature parity with their Vista drivers.

If Windows 7 were due for release in a month or two, we'd be a little worried by some of what we see here. Given the time frame, and the fact that ATI is "beating" them in the Win7 performance race, we'd be surprised if Nvidia wasn't as fast or faster in the new OS well before its release.

The real question is: how much better will it get? This build 7000 beta of Windows 7 is not as fast as the newer beta builds, and Microsoft continues to improve. There's no doubt some debug code embedded in the OS, which affects performance.