Myth: Windows 8.1 is horrible for gaming.
Reality: Fiction
I have one computer where I have been switching in between
Windows XP Media Center 32-bit, Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit, and Windows 8.1
32-bit (I use 32 bit Windows 8.1 because my processor doesn’t support
PreFetchW). In all, I see better performance in games in Windows XP hands down.
But between Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, I see AT LEAST a 10 FPS increase in all
of my games. And I’m talking games Like Dead Space, Just Cause 2, Need for
Speed: Hot Pursuit, and several other intense games. Just to test it, I opened
up Minecraft 1.7.9 and set all settings to max. Here are my results:
Windows 7: 45.2 Avg FPS
Windows 8.1: 59.8 Avg FPS
All of these tests were done on a near fresh installation of
Windows with only Steam running in the background (which is required to launch
most of my games). As for the upgrade from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1, I had a
friend who had recently bought a laptop that came pre-installed with Windows 8
64-bit Standard. He had bought it with the hopes that it would be able to play
his games on the go. He was highly disappointed when he installed Call of Duty:
Black Ops and found out that it operated at <20 FPS. Sometimes, it would
even dip down to the below 10 range when he was in a large gunfight. He brought
it to me and the first thing I noticed was that he hadn’t installed a single
update from Windows Update (He was missing around 10 updates). We installed
them all to no avail. In fact, I think I made it worse. I then proceeded to
install the Windows 8.1 Upgrade from the store. After that, MASSIVE
improvement. His FPS can peak at around 45 FPS and it rarely dips down lower
than 20 in a really messy fight. I haven’t heard back from him whether or not
the Spring Update boosted his FPS or not. It did on me, but only by about 5
FPS.
Myth: Windows 8.1’s metro apps are dumb
Reality: Fiction
Initially, we all hated the metro
interface.
It was like someone accidentally put a tablet app store in a PC operating
system. Really though, they can have some potential. Sure touch screen desktops
are a long way from claiming the market, but they still have their uses. In the
spring update for Windows 8.1, they added the a ability to pin metro apps to
the taskbar and to be able to minimize metro apps. And they even added the
ability to see the taskbar while within the app. Sure you might hate the fact
that the app demands all of your screen space, but now with the update, you can
now just think of it as a really big desktop app.
Myth: Windows 8.1 doesn't support
many devices.
Reality: Depends
For USB devices, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8.x all use the same Windows update database for drivers. There is no reason it shouldn't support your previously working devices. As for computer internals, I have heard some rumors that Windows 8.x is a little bit picky with what it will run on, but I have no experience with this, everything worked perfectly on my three computers.Joshua: http://fiverr.com/armmaster17
Brandon: http://fiverr.com/maltzy
