Windows 7 vs Windows 8 – The Definitive Performance Guide

Windows 8 has been out for 2 weeks now, and for many people the jury is still out. I think the sticking point for most people is whether they can accept the Metro interface on a desktop PC (okay, they call it “Modern UI” now, but we’re still going to refer to it as Metro, since that’s what everyone who doesn’t work for Microsoft calls it).

This article is not going to address the UI itself; plenty of bloggers have done so already. But I will say this – it really doesn’t matter whether you like it or not. I have been using Windows 8 since it launched, and to me, it is simply two interfaces tacked together. Or more accurately, Metro is tacked on top of the desktop UI. If you prefer, you can use Windows 8 practically without ever looking at the Start Screen or any of the Metro apps. Miss the Start button? Install Classic Shell, a 600K app that will give you an even more useful Start button than before. It even runs Metro apps, if you want to use them (I actually like the new Music app and Smart DJ has helped me discover some great bands based on my current collection) and apps downloaded from “Store”.

Aside from the interface that can be ignored, there are plenty of new features added to Windows 8. But again, that’s not the goal of this article. All we care about today is performance. Performance in desktop applications, and performance in gaming.

Windows 8 Performance

The Windows 8 kernel features a lot of behind-the-scenes tweaks that don’t get mentioned in features lists or screenshots. For instance, ever since the introduction of Bulldozer CPUs and later Piledriver, AMD have been telling us just wait until Windows 8 comes out – it will properly handle thread scheduling, and CPU performance will increase.

With behind the scenes performance enhancements like this, you might actually have a good reason to consider upgrading. We are going to look at Windows 8 performance from three different angles:

• Integrated Windows Software (Internet Explorer, Media codecs, integrated cryptography, etc)
• Desktop applications (Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, 3ds Max, etc)
• Gaming (Unreal Engine 3, Frostbite 2, CryEngine, Creation Engine (Skyrim)

Gaming Performance Test Notes

I should take a moment to explain our game benchmark methodology, because it’s a lot different from what you see on most sites. Well all but one at this point, because it was Scott Wasson at Tech Report who spearheaded the “Inside The Second” method of gaming performance testing that we use.

Essentially what it comes down to is that looking at the overall frames per second doesn’t give a clear indication on how a game actually performs. Looking at a one minute, or even a one second snapshot is not sufficient to tell you about the actual feel of how a game performs. Instead, you need to look “inside the second” and record how long it takes to deliver each individual frame, in milliseconds. You can see a perfect example of this here in Witcher 2, when we first started using his method for our AMD vs Nvidia HD6870 vs 560 GTX article. Just because both GPUs deliver the same frame rate over 1 second, does NOT mean they are delivering frames at the same speed within that second.

If we were to use the old paradigm of “frames per second” method of testing, I can tell you now that there would appear to be no difference between Windows 7 and Windows 8 in gaming performance. Maybe you have even read elsewhere stating as much, but that is not the case, as you’re about to see. Not the case at all.

Here’s an example from one of our gaming tests we’ll be looking at. Identical hardware and drivers; the only difference is Windows 7 vs Windows 8. The “frames per second” results were identical, but one of the Windows versions obviously performs quite different than the other, and is dropping frames leading to micro-stuttering. Which one? Read on to find out ;)

Application Performance Test Notes

We will be testing application performance using trace based benchmarks. This type of benchmark traces the speed of pre-recorded user input in various scenarios and programs. This is important, because it will tell us how each OS will respond to actual user input rather than just hardware speed.

We could tell you how long each OS takes to copy a file, or extract an archive, or encode an MP3. But unless something is wrong, those operations will be purely limited by CPU or storage hardware speed, and will thus be identical no matter what OS you’re using. What we want to find out is how fast each OS will allow you to be productive, or how efficiently you can consume media.

Our goal was not to have the first “Windows 7 vs Windows 8″ article though; what we want is the definitive performance comparison.

The Test

To give the most rounded results possible, we put together three different systems:

• High End – Intel Core i7 Extreme 3960X with16GB Ram and a GeForce video card
• Midrange – AMD FX-8350 with 8GB Ram and a GeForce video card
• Entry Level – Intel Core i3 3220 with 8GB Ram and a Radeon video card

I think this covers most modern systems people might consider today. Using the latest AMD FX with Piledriver cores will help us determine if the enhanced thread scheduling will lead to real world results (although we did install the Windows 7 updates that partly addressed this). The Core i7 Extreme will tell us how the two desktop operating systems will run on Enterprise level hardware, since that’s what the i7 Extreme/X79 platform is. And the Core i3 will show us how a less threaded CPU will handle the new OS.

We also mixed up the graphics cards, giving us results from both AMD and Nvidia GPUs, using the latest WHQL drivers.

Here is how the systems were configured:

All OS installations were clean installs, with no extra software added, and each OS was reinstalled between each benchmark type (Integrated App, Desktop App, Gaming). On Windows 7, SP1 was installed, along with the AMD thread scheduling updates 1 and 2. On Windows 8, we installed the important performance updates (even operating systems aren’t immune to the “Day 1 Patch” anymore it seems) described in this knowledge base article.

With all that out of the way, let’s get to it! We’ll start with the integrated apps that come installed with Windows.