Average performance on Win7 and 8 will be almost the same. Depends from test/game results are slightly higher or lower but hardware manufacturers will stop to optimize drivers for older systems so performance on Win8 will only improve while on Win7 not so much.
Has performance been better on 7? If it's better in several games on 8 and the same on all others, that doesn't average out to no difference. That means Windows 8 performance is better.
Yesterday I was trying to download WinXP drivers for GTX970 and there are no drivers for 900 series on nvidia site. There are still drivers on other sites but it clearly shows that nvidia will stop release drivers for this system or will include only basic options. The same will be with Vista/Win7 soon but at least these systems are not much different than Win8 so it will take some time.
I just feel that Microsoft is pushing hardware manufacturers to focus on Win8+ as they see that profit from new systems is not as high as they were expecting.
Yes, it has been and will remain difficult to get the latest hardware drivers for aging operating systems. Same driver on 7 vs. 8, though, 8 will be faster because of OS optimizations. Hardware manufacturers aren't going to put the same amount of money into developing drivers for older (and slower) operating systems because they know people will (and should) move on.
MS released Win8.1 really quick for free and still try to improve various things as users simply don't like Win8.
Not so long time ago we had premiere of Win8, next 8.1 and soon Win9. Hard to call system good when its creator is changing it so often. If they listened to the crowd instead of forcing useless features then it would be success.
Right now we will have to wait for full DX12 and I doubt that MS will release it for Win7 looking at their strategy.
I'm not saying that Win8 is pure evil but I just see how it looks like and how people are reacting on Win8. At work we had a lot of problems to convince many clients to Win8. They think it's a new system for longer while we already see info about Win9.
Most software companies are on an annual release cycle and they have been for a while. It's called competition. It sometimes breeds misdirected UI changes, but more often than not, it's technological advancement that comes out of it (i.e. the same video card performing 5-10% better in an older OS vs. a newer OS).
W7 vs. 8 has been discussed
ad nauseam elsewhere and I don't feel like we're saying anything new here. Yea, W8 looks different and has some gimmicky nonsense (queue c627627 commenting that you can easily change this
), but it's essentially the same and is faster. We jump through a million different hoops to overclock our components and squeeze every last % out of them, but fluster when we have to trade a start screen for a 10% graphics performance bump?
