Yea, it will take time for some time for more GPU's to come out and for more games to start using DX11.

As of right now, I believe Windows 7 performs similarly to the currently updated Windows Vista. Some games run a little better and some worse than Vista. It's obviously really early and we'll see what happens as Microsoft updates Windows 7 and hardware manufactures work on their driver support.

*edit*

Windows 7 vs Vista

http://www.guru3d.com/article/windows-7-vs-vista-vga-game-performance/

"Windows 7 is a very promising platform for many reasons. For me personally, Windows 7 is what Vista was supposed to be really. With our pretty spiffy test platform we can tell you that it's a pleasure of an operating system to work with. It's fast, good looking, diverse and most of all... very stable on all levels. Neither with the NVIDIA or ATI graphics cards did we run into any issues, and that is quite remarkable considering we are at the threshold of a new operating system era.

The VGA drivers are not only stable, they work really well and perform good as well. I was afraid that with the coming of a new OS we'd see a performance drop just like we had with the transition from Windows XP to Vista, but if anything, Windows 7 VGA performance is as good as Windows Vista with the obviously occasional random fluctuation in performance here and there though. Looking at the opposite side, Windows 7 won't offer performance increases in graphics performance either with an exception here and there.

Windows 7 will obviously bring a lot of good stuff along with it in the near future... though it will be available for Vista as well, DirectX 11 is just around the corner. Better shaders, better shader performance, a new compute shader and hardware tessellation are just some of the few new but exciting items that DX11 will bring. Of course this website can't wait until some actual DirectX 11 class graphics cards are released ... and along with it software applications and games.

So if you are a little afraid of picking up Windows 7 due to driver issues... don't be. It's stable and working really really nicely. Two big thumbs up to both ATI, NVIDIA and sure .. Microsoft. And as a testament to that, let me assure you, we'll be switching all our test systems towards a Windows 7 based platform... real soon."

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I did the student deal and pre-ordered Windows 7 Professional Upgrade for $30. Since it's just the upgrade version (32-bit OR 64-bit as opposed to having both in the full retail version), I decided it would be best to go for the 64-bit version even if my lowly e2160 that's overclocked and measly 2gigs of ram wouldn't make that much use of it.

I think what I'll try to do is continue to hold onto XP and dual boot if needed.

"As of right now, I believe Windows 7 performs similarly to the currently updated Windows Vista."

I seriously hope not!

Um, no. Just Vista and 7. XP never got a DX10 driver model, so while it is possible in theory, it would be a major architecture effort we would have heard about by now.

Games using DX11 won't be common until next Christmas time. However I do think it's worth it to buy one if you have the opportunit, given they are reasonably good valueand that the whole lineup ($35 - >$500) will be out by Q1 next year on the AMD side. That said, Nvidia won't have anything DX11 for a while. My guess is April-May time for the high-end, and no mainstream parts until late 2010 [Took them 16 months to get GT200 derivatives out].