Conclusion

Most of you guys might have already expected that, in the case of gaming performance, the three operating systems aren’t worlds apart. Nevertheless it is interesting to see that there are some actual differences. As you can see by the results gathered during our testing, Windows 8.1 is producing the highest frame rates. On second place there is Windows 7 and Windows 10 comes in third. If we were to come up with kind of a forecast, we’d be writing that maybe, at some point in the future Windows 10 could be the fastest operating system from Microsoft for gaming, but just now the crown belongs to Windows 8.1.

Talking about UHD (2160p) we were actually surprised to see that on average Windows 8.1 is 2.1 percent quicker than Windows 7 and there is a 3.9 percent gap in between Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. Diving a little bit deeper into the individual benchmarks we find that Watch Dogs, at 2160p, runs almost 6.5 percent quicker on Windows 8.1 than on Windows 7 and compared to Windows 10 there is a 4 percent gap. Another interesting title is Sniper 3. In this case Windows 8.1 performs no less than 9.6 percent better than Windows 10, which is a huge difference in our opinion.

Having a look at 1440p we see that Windows 8.1 is on average 0.5 percent quicker than Windows 7 and 2.5 percent quicker than Windows 10. With the resolution set to 1080p Windows 8.1 is 0.4 percent quicker than Windows 7 and there is a difference of 2.2 percent comparing Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. Overall it is interesting to see that the higher the resolution the bigger the differences between the operating systems are becoming.

Maybe Microsoft is still working its magic on performance improvements with Windows 10. Considering that there is no final version of Windows 10 as of today, we’re curious to conduct the same testing at a later stage, when Windows 10 has officially been released. Apart from the possibility, that Windows 10 is not yet perfectly optimized, it could also be highly likely that publishers and game developers need to add some patches to their titles in order to make games perform as well on Windows 10 as they do on Windows 8.1.

Page 1 - Test Setup	Page 9 - GRID Autosport
Page 2 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 10 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 3 - BattleField 4	Page 11 - Metro Last Light
Page 4 - Watch Dogs	Page 12 - Power Consumption
Page 5 - Tomb Raider	Page 13 - Performance
Page 6 - Sniper Elite 3	Page 14 - Prices
Page 7 - Crysis 3	Page 15 - Conclusion
Page 8 - Thief