[The Tech Buyers Guru] Does the OS matter (in games)? Windows 7 vs. 8.1 - Surprising

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wand3r3r

Limp Gawd
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I'll post this here too as there has been a lot of interest in BF4, Windows 8.1, etc. (Including an article by [h] on BF4 in 7 vs. 8).

The Tech Buyers guru wrote an excellent article on Windows 7 vs. 8.1 and gaming.

The results were quite surprising! The final results blew me away after reading the first pages!


Regardless of the pros and cons of the new interface. With the release of Windows 8.1, we decided to put the question to the test. We've compiled results in nearly a dozen benchmarks to give you a full picture of exactly how Windows 8.1 performs in games, and to put it simply, it's not that simple. Read on to learn more!
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http://www.techbuyersguru.com/windowsgaming.php

The article really left me with a solid impression though. In the future I believe Windows 8.1 will have amazing potential. At first it was appearing surprising to me but wow BF4 is impressive in 8.1. I'm shocked how much of an impact Hyperthreading has on it too. Is BF4 an outlier or a sign of things to come?

That was an excellent article, props to The Tech Buyers Guru!
 
BF4 uses DX11.1 which isn't available to Win 7.

This is from Johan Andersson (Technical Director for the Frostbite Engine) -
“We use DX11.1, there are some optimizations in it (constant buffer offsets, dynamic buffers as SRVs) that we got in to the the API that improves CPU performance in our rendering when one runs with DX11.1. This will be in BF4.”
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This is why it would be interesting to examine BF4 Mantle performance in Win 8 vs Win 7, as well as comparing it to DX11.1
 
Would I even benefit from windows 8.1 with a 2500k? Or is it particularly the newer cpus
 
as far as bf4 is concerned win8.1 helps older cpus as well...running it on 3 much older systems than yours and have been pretty pleased so far
 
I don't think the 780GTX was the best card to use because Nvidia doesn't fully support DX 11.1 like AMD does at the hardware level.
 
Maybe it's just me. But I've never upgraded or bought a new operating system for the sake of improving game performance. From generation to generation it was always a small improvement that eventually would widen, but by that time it would be ready to upgrade regardless. Either due to support or just the hardware getting dull.

To me it's just a silly comparison, but I guess for the very small amount that care about every square root of an ounce performance boost it holds value.
 
The Windows 8 upgrade was available for $15/license for the quick right after release- otherwise I'd be on 7 x64 Pro on all three computers still. After the first upgrade went off without a hitch, I did the other two, and haven't looked back. I did however put Start8 on them a month or two ago, and along with the upgrade to 8.1, I don't really notice the difference between XP and 7 at work and 8.1 at home.
 
I'm in the small group who actually likes Windows 8.1 lol I couldn't do 8 as the start menu thing irritated me and for whatever reason I just had a lot of crashes when it first came out that I went back to 7 but I've been one 8.1 since its release and I'm not going back to 7.

I still don't like metro but I never use it so it doesn't bother me. If I had a tablet it'd be fine. I love Hyper-V and Server Manager. There are a lot of things I don't like but I've not ran across anything that I didn't like that couldn't be changed or ignored easily enough.
 
bibo_m16 said:
I think Win 8.1 will perform well for future games.
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I concur, I'm surprised but not in a good way. I was under the impression that 8 was faster overall but out of so many tests here it only had 3 clear victories and they were not by noticeable differences (aside from BF4). Moral is, if all you play is BF4 you have an easy choice.
 
Scheibler1 said:
Would I even benefit from windows 8.1 with a 2500k? Or is it particularly the newer cpus
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In theory if the benefit is to reduce CPU overhead then you benefit more with a slower CPU.

fanboy said:
I don't think the 780GTX was the best card to use because Nvidia doesn't fully support DX 11.1 like AMD does at the hardware level.
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I believe it fully supports the features being leveraged in this case with BF4 however.

PliotronX said:
I concur, I'm surprised but not in a good way. I was under the impression that 8 was faster overall but out of so many tests here it only had 3 clear victories and they were not by noticeable differences (aside from BF4). Moral is, if all you play is BF4 you have an easy choice.
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Generally you will more likely encounter games leveraging the newer API going forward. Keep in mind BF4 is also the newest game among the ones tested.
 
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