So is anybody buying Windows 8 to improve their machine for gaming? I'll be honest what I'm going to say in this thread is totally ignorant, I haven't really read too much into Windows 8.
I just can't find anything that explains how it actually works. All I can find is information about the apps and the stupid Metro UI. I just feel like Microsoft is streamlining the Phone/Tablet experience into the PC experience like Apple has. To me this OS just seems aimed at the casual PC user and not meant for enthusiasts like the gaming community.
What I really want to know is if it's better than 7. 7 was a beautiful upgrade over Vista and I have no problems with 7 at all. It just looks like 8 is bringing back the bloat/fat that 7 cut from Vista along with an interface I'm not willing to adapt to at this time.
Does 8 function better? Has anyone playing Diablo 3 / Guild Wars 2 on it and can say it was a better experience over 7? Should I buy it to keep my PC current? Or is 8 a skip like Vista was.
Ok this sounds good, but I actually do not have an SSD so do you think I would the same speeds as you with an HDD?
I would need your complete computer specs but I would say it would similar speeds without an SSD, with a smoother experience.
You can download the Windows 8 Release Preview straight from Microsoft for free.
If you test out the Release Preview you will have the option to buy the full release for $40 dollars once Windows 8 ships in October.
Also, the price of SSDs have come down look for deals on passwird.com they have them everyday. You can get a small boot drive 100gb for around $100 or less.
I have Windows 8 Release Preview x64 installed on my home gaming laptop and gaming desktop.
I would say it runs about 5-10% faster with current gen SSDs than the comparable Windows 7 machine.
The key for the performance is a SSD with at least SATA 3 6.0gps specification.
The reason is the new caching and algorithms built into Windows 8 for coping/transferring/reading files.
I have a pretty modern gaming desktop, and a brand new Dell XPS 15 playing WoW, D3, SC2, and GW2.
None of these games are all that intensive, but Windows 8 is definitely a smoother OS.
They have worked out lots of bugs over the alpha/beta process, and the new start menu/metro ui is basically a normal Windows 7 start menu on steroids.
An SSD is great, but it only improves performance that is disk IO bound, i.e., loding textures and whatnot from the file system. Once you are playing it is highly unlikely that the client is going to disk to get data. That would be silly as reading from disk (even with an SSD) is orders of magnitude slower than reading from system memory (RAM). It speeds up load times, but that's it.
What you'll be more concerned with is the performance of the Windows 8 driver for your graphics card.
An SSD is great, but it only improves performance that is disk IO bound, i.e., loding textures and whatnot from the file system. Once you are playing it is highly unlikely that the client is going to disk to get data. That would be silly as reading from disk (even with an SSD) is orders of magnitude slower than reading from system memory (RAM). It speeds up load times, but that's it.
What you'll be more concerned with is the performance of the Windows 8 driver for your graphics card.
Well you do need to load the whole game into ram to start playing games, and that is increased by the speed of your SSD/HDD.
Loading times are much faster, and I doubt unless you have significant amounts of RAM that it is loading the entire game into memory.
An SSD is great, but it only improves performance that is disk IO bound, i.e., loding textures and whatnot from the file system. Once you are playing it is highly unlikely that the client is going to disk to get data. That would be silly as reading from disk (even with an SSD) is orders of magnitude slower than reading from system memory (RAM). It speeds up load times, but that's it.
What you'll be more concerned with is the performance of the Windows 8 driver for your graphics card.
Well you do need to load the whole game into ram to start playing games, and that is increased by the speed of your SSD/HDD.
Loading times are much faster, and I doubt unless you have significant amounts of RAM that it is loading the entire game into memory.
The "entire game" is never loaded into RAM at once, that would be stupid and impractical. When you enter a zone it is loaded (why do you think loading screens exist?) If you are really low on RAM then yes, it will likely help because you are constantly hitting the page file to get at data. However, RAM is so cheap these days that a RAM upgrade would be a much better idea at that point than investing in an SSD.
Not to say SSD's aren't great, they are, I love mine. It's just a small concern when talking about game performance and one that is pretty meaningless save for map load times.
I played about with the beta and my opinion of it was that it was horrible, the metro UI is terrible, the fact that it wouldn't actually let me close any open application was just stupid. I spent about 2 days looking at it for work and that was it, since i last looked at it ive not even bothered to keep up to date with changes to it.
Unless they get rid of the forced Metro UI and let you have a standard Windows Desktop I will personally be staying away from it.
MS are trying to streamline their OS's, which I can see the point but a tablet OS on a PC doesn't work. Metro on a tablet/phone is fine, it works with the layout and usability, but on a windws PC be it laptop or desktop just doesn't work in my eyes.
Regarding people saying that the beta is working 5-10% better than Windows 7. Well Windows Vista in Beta was actually amazing but then when they set it for release they broke alot of stuff by removing certain things, like mass driver support and backwards comparability.
Personally i'd say unless forced to move to Windows Metro stay on Windows 7 for as long as you can
You close applications from hovering your mouse in the upper left hand corner of the screen, also the task manager has been greatly overhauled for OCD people.
if you can get over the 'OMG its different', it is an improvement over Windows 7.
It isn't perfect, and they have fixed lots of things, and the OS hasn't even launched yet.
The learning curve of this OS, is similar to Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. So if you are not interested in learning how to do functions in a new OS it may not be for you.
Also have they added the ability to move the tiles around so you can arrange them how YOU want them rather than it dictating to you how it has to be (alphabetical order)? As that was really annoying, having to scroll through various screen of tiles to get where i wanted to be was just fail.
Yes you can move the icons around, and add/pin shortcuts for any .exe/app installed. Now if they would allow you to resize icons on the fly and add in custom animations for games that would be really really cool. I want all my games to be two boxes long and they are all one box long atm, and live tiles are restricted to Microsoft apps atm.
Frankly I think it's shit and I'll be ignoring it completely.
Though, I think it's funny. My mother bought a computer off my sister's friend (who happens to be a geek) and it happened to have W8 on it. After a week she came to me and asked me to change the os to anything else. (Now she has Ubuntu, which is hilarious because she isn't too good at computers.)
Anyway, I am wondering when Windows 9 is coming out personally.
Windows has been following a sort of Tick-Tock model of development where they introduce a lot of new features in one version, and then clean up all the complaints in the next:
ME -> XP -> Vista -> Win7 -> Win8
I think chances are good that there probably will be some innate performance advantages of upgrading, but you may not see them until everyone figures out how to optimize for Win8. A fast dual core used to beat out a quad-core CPU for gaming until the games were coded to optimize for it.
All the same, I'm still going to buy a copy of Win8 this year, even if I don't install it right away, just because they're giving a fairly sweet discount for early adopters:
From a cursory glance at windows 8 (I got to play around with it for about an hour one day), I found it confusing to an introductory user. I'm going to need to sit there and just search google half the time to learn the shortcuts and such.
The metro UI doesn't seem conducive to the dual purposes of a workstation/gaming machine that I would need for work and fun. I can see it being really good on touch screens though I'm just not convinced for desktops.
Hardware Accelerating Everything: Windows 8 Graphics
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That was nice. Problem is, only part that matter to games is from 2:30 on. Erm... which game is DirectX 11.1? =p
How many games are DX11 at all? Consoles don't run games like current PCs, so we're not getting games that really exploit much of the current tech. Once you see the new consoles we'll definately jump into some real hardware usage, but until then, it's pretty much a rarity.
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I just can't find anything that explains how it actually works. All I can find is information about the apps and the stupid Metro UI. I just feel like Microsoft is streamlining the Phone/Tablet experience into the PC experience like Apple has. To me this OS just seems aimed at the casual PC user and not meant for enthusiasts like the gaming community.
What I really want to know is if it's better than 7. 7 was a beautiful upgrade over Vista and I have no problems with 7 at all. It just looks like 8 is bringing back the bloat/fat that 7 cut from Vista along with an interface I'm not willing to adapt to at this time.
Does 8 function better? Has anyone playing Diablo 3 / Guild Wars 2 on it and can say it was a better experience over 7? Should I buy it to keep my PC current? Or is 8 a skip like Vista was.
I would say it runs about 5-10% faster with current gen SSDs than the comparable Windows 7 machine.
The key for the performance is a SSD with at least SATA 3 6.0gps specification.
The reason is the new caching and algorithms built into Windows 8 for coping/transferring/reading files.
I have a pretty modern gaming desktop, and a brand new Dell XPS 15 playing WoW, D3, SC2, and GW2.
None of these games are all that intensive, but Windows 8 is definitely a smoother OS.
They have worked out lots of bugs over the alpha/beta process, and the new start menu/metro ui is basically a normal Windows 7 start menu on steroids.
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Curse PremiumWin95: Huge improvement over 3.1, but filled with bugs
Win98: It's a smoother, faster, bugfree Win95.
WinME: Horrible
WinXP: Removed bloat/fat, smoother, faster version.
WinVista: Beyond Horrible
Win7: Removed Bloat/fat, smoother, faster version.
If history serves...yeah i'm staying with my 7 Ultimate until Win9.
I would need your complete computer specs but I would say it would similar speeds without an SSD, with a smoother experience.
You can download the Windows 8 Release Preview straight from Microsoft for free.
If you test out the Release Preview you will have the option to buy the full release for $40 dollars once Windows 8 ships in October.
Also, the price of SSDs have come down look for deals on passwird.com they have them everyday. You can get a small boot drive 100gb for around $100 or less.
An SSD is great, but it only improves performance that is disk IO bound, i.e., loding textures and whatnot from the file system. Once you are playing it is highly unlikely that the client is going to disk to get data. That would be silly as reading from disk (even with an SSD) is orders of magnitude slower than reading from system memory (RAM). It speeds up load times, but that's it.
What you'll be more concerned with is the performance of the Windows 8 driver for your graphics card.
Well you do need to load the whole game into ram to start playing games, and that is increased by the speed of your SSD/HDD.
Loading times are much faster, and I doubt unless you have significant amounts of RAM that it is loading the entire game into memory.
The "entire game" is never loaded into RAM at once, that would be stupid and impractical. When you enter a zone it is loaded (why do you think loading screens exist?) If you are really low on RAM then yes, it will likely help because you are constantly hitting the page file to get at data. However, RAM is so cheap these days that a RAM upgrade would be a much better idea at that point than investing in an SSD.
Not to say SSD's aren't great, they are, I love mine. It's just a small concern when talking about game performance and one that is pretty meaningless save for map load times.
What do you mean with removed bloat/fat? Anything I can remove to improve the speed of W7 or did I got you wrong there?
D3 Channel: OnetwoD3
You close applications from hovering your mouse in the upper left hand corner of the screen, also the task manager has been greatly overhauled for OCD people.
if you can get over the 'OMG its different', it is an improvement over Windows 7.
It isn't perfect, and they have fixed lots of things, and the OS hasn't even launched yet.
The learning curve of this OS, is similar to Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. So if you are not interested in learning how to do functions in a new OS it may not be for you.
Yes you can move the icons around, and add/pin shortcuts for any .exe/app installed. Now if they would allow you to resize icons on the fly and add in custom animations for games that would be really really cool. I want all my games to be two boxes long and they are all one box long atm, and live tiles are restricted to Microsoft apps atm.
Though, I think it's funny. My mother bought a computer off my sister's friend (who happens to be a geek) and it happened to have W8 on it. After a week she came to me and asked me to change the os to anything else. (Now she has Ubuntu, which is hilarious because she isn't too good at computers.)
Anyway, I am wondering when Windows 9 is coming out personally.
ME -> XP -> Vista -> Win7 -> Win8
I think chances are good that there probably will be some innate performance advantages of upgrading, but you may not see them until everyone figures out how to optimize for Win8. A fast dual core used to beat out a quad-core CPU for gaming until the games were coded to optimize for it.
All the same, I'm still going to buy a copy of Win8 this year, even if I don't install it right away, just because they're giving a fairly sweet discount for early adopters:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/windows-8-upgrades-to-be-cheaper-than-ever/
And definitely check into SSD's. I see sales for them every week, and it doesn't take a huge one to throw your OS and program files on.
The metro UI doesn't seem conducive to the dual purposes of a workstation/gaming machine that I would need for work and fun. I can see it being really good on touch screens though I'm just not convinced for desktops.
I'm doing the same.
Hardware Accelerating Everything: Windows 8 Graphics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtpnVdnkUL0&feature=player_embedded#!
How many games are DX11 at all? Consoles don't run games like current PCs, so we're not getting games that really exploit much of the current tech. Once you see the new consoles we'll definately jump into some real hardware usage, but until then, it's pretty much a rarity.