Windows 7 vs Windows 8, Difference and gaming perfromance :

The release of Windows 8 in late 2012 has polarized the online community.  Some people recommend sticking with 7, while others love the new features and performance of 8.  Whether you are upgrading from 7 to 8 or thinking about buying one or the other, you will have to evaluate each product yourself to see which suits your needs.There were some initial complaints about Windows 8, but Microsoft listened and has recently released Windows 8.1, which addresses many of these concerns.

There are several important differences between Windows 7 and Windows 8, and they are immediately noticeable.  Windows 8 is designed to work with touchscreens on mobile devices like phones and tablets, and probably comes as quite a shock to someone expecting a typical Windows desktop with a Start bar and icons.Instead of this, a user finds herself looking at a tablet-style interface that is full of what are called tiles.  These tiles open individual apps, while programs are still executed from a standard desktop-mode.


PC Mag.com has published a speed test of Windows 7 v.s. Windows 8, using a Toshiba Portege R835-P88 laptop with a 2.5GHz Core i5-2450M chip, an Intel HD Graphics 3000 integrated graphics processor, a 500GB hard drive, and 6GB of RAM.  64-bit versions of Windows 7 and 8 were used, with all updates at the time installed.

They found that startup times for Windows 8 were vastly improved over 7 – about twice as fast.  Shutdown time was better as well, but not by as much.  Windows 8 saves the system and memory to a file and reloads it when booted up; Windows 7 needs to take the time to initiate all these processes again.

To test file transfer speed, a USB 2.0 drive with 81 diverse files totaling 500MB was moved onto the computer, as well as a single file that was almost 1GB.  There was no noticeable difference in transfer speed, though this may simply be a hardware limitation.  Windows 8 did predict transfer time more accurately, and was able to move files from folder to folder within the system nearly instantly.

Windows 7 vs Windows 8 Gaming Performance:

Performance-wise, there is no difference between Windows 7 and 8 when it comes to frame rates, so a given game will run at the same speed on the same hardware regardless of whether you have Windows 7 or Windows 8 installed.

If you’re interested in the technical differences, Windows 7 has only partial support for Direct3D 11.1, which is part of DirectX. Windows 8 has full support.

However, while it’s possible that game developers will use some features that aren’t supported in Windows 7, it’s very unlikely that you’ll notice the difference. The game will still run in Windows 7, but the graphics quality might be slightly reduced.