For the games i play the performance improvements looks like this:
According to
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-8-gaming-performance,3331-11.html +
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-8-gaming-performance,3331-12.html
WoW: 1 FPS (whoot.. i guess with a better binned chip i get more than that).
Skyrim: Nothing...
So i dont know why people hype Win 8 for its supreme peformance, for me there is simply no gain. Anyway, the good thing is that Win 8 is not a performance hog, in the way Vista was. Because Vista had worse performance than XP, so it was in no way in the same position such as Win 8. But still, the gain from a slight OC would easely outperform the gain the Win 8 OS could do, and some OC luck would be much more useful instead of changing the OS.
I guess they made some improvement on memory management, thats the cause of some FPS gain some games are experiencing. But its just as i said, its nowhere close to the gain some OC luck would be capable to reveal, sadly. Getting better hardware or getting a good OC chip is still unavoidable for any real performance gain.
Well i mean its really fine, i would gratefully accept Overclockers supreme Matrix-7970 GPU in exchange for several Win 8 OS (i will hand out those OS and rather take theyr Matrix GPU... way better deal). Then they can be happy with 1 higher FPS each PC and i will happily accept my 30 FPS gain, fair deal.
As opposed to your FPS gain, this one is the bad taste:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Windows-8-Gaming-developers-Stardock-Newell,16788.html
I clearly can see that movement, more and more locking down the OS, the same stuff Apple was doing all the time. Finally, MS is probably trying to make some comparable approach, but including selling a OS, which surely is a risky issue because many consumers may become feed up with this because they realize the way its heading. MS simply want to implement theyr service even more, in the same way Apple is doing it all those years and certainly highly sucessful because they became the richest company worldwide.
For the mainstream consumers, putting them inside a jail is probably the most succesfull thing someone could do because to much freedom only is making them confused and feeling insecure i guess. But for the professionals and all the people who would like a highly customizable OS, its a nightmare and it may lock down theyr possibilitys. Now we could say, "but those custom-lovers can still get Linux", thats just partially true because for gamers a Win OS is still mostly unavoidable in order to get all the possible features and support, so the gamers surely will have to get a Win OS, and the others certainly may switch to Linux. However, its well known that there is a increasing dev support for Linux OS at least, but still not big enough.
I think, a huge base of devs may not properly support Win 8 and keep stick with Win 7 as theyr main "support OS", so Win 7 users surely wont face any disadvantages and they may achieve the highest compatibility which is way more useful than a 1 FPS gain.
Because
the by far most important ability a OS have to execute is to be compatible, thats absolutly critical, else big issues will happen. A few FPS is the smallest of all problems and im sure there isnt a single user in Overclockers who isnt able to increase theyr PCs performance in another way.
