Tom's Hardware installed Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 on a modern AM5 test system with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Radeon RX 6950 XT, then compared gaming performance against Windows 11 25H2 on the same hardware. The test covered eight DirectX 11 games and two DirectX 9 titles. Getting Windows 7 running required slipstreaming NVMe and USB 3.0 drivers into the installer, disabling Secure Boot, and enabling CSM because the OS predates modern boot and storage standards.
Across the DirectX 11 games, Windows 7 delivered several notable wins, especially in CPU-limited scenarios, while Windows 11 tended to pull ahead when the GPU was the bottleneck. In the two DirectX 9 games, Windows 7 had a structural advantage: it ran them natively, whereas Windows 11 used the D3D9On12 mapping layer. Tom's Hardware also notes that the Windows 11 driver package, though released in the same month as the Windows 7 driver, is based on a newer codebase, so the comparison is not perfectly apples-to-apples.
This is a single outlet's test on one specific configuration, so the results should not be generalized to all modern PCs. Still, they show that a 17-year-old operating system can remain competitive in legacy titles when the hardware has driver support and legacy boot options available.