Two years ago, Microsoft released Windows 8. It was well supported with updates and such but did not fulfil a gamer’s needs. Many developers and gamers called it out for its bad performance. Gabe Newell, head of Valve, the company behind Steam, the premier digital distribution client for PC games called it a “catastrophe”. Windows 8 is however, now behind us. After quite the wait, Windows 10 is out, and Microsoft claim it’s better than ever in terms of gaming and productivity.
While that may hold true for any professional use, but is it good for casual or hardcore gaming? Is it going to be as much of a problem to use Windows 10 for gaming as it was for Win 8 which offered no performance bonuses but a ton of compatibility issues?
Certainly not, as Windows 10 features DirectX 12, which is one of the reasons gamers will definitely consider the upgrade. DirectX 12 optimizes GPU performance to speed up multithreaded applications & games tremendously. It might not make sense to but just understand this, most graphic cards are unable to perform at full potential due to bottle-necking problems. The older your GPU is the more exponential performance growth it will show. We could see as much as up to 300% in performance boosts. One thing to note is that the games will need to be written for DirectX 12, which the most-played games these days might be switched over, as programmers are able to switch to DX12 with relative ease. Another thing is the fact that with DirectX 12, your PC will also be able to utilize multiple GPUs at once as opposed to various 3rd party solutions such as Nvidia’s SLI and AMD’s Crossfire that do not offer uniform experiences across the board for gamers. For example, if you have an integrated graphics card in your motherboard (most new or high-end PCs do), you will be able to take full advantage of it without hindering the performance of your main graphics card. Lastly, DX12 will decrease power consumption as performance-per-watt will increase, allowing consumers to benefit from better visuals with decreasing power consumption.
A few more things to note about Windows 10 is that the boot time is much, much quicker compared to Win 7, and slightly quicker than Win 8. Games can now run on borderless window mode without any glitches (Yay!), this is something not only video makers can make full use of, but which will also help out regular gamers to alt-tab faster to other windows and such.
Microsoft is trying to bring their products in one place, as Windows 10 also provides Xbox Live support, and you can stream games directly to your PC. While this may be good news for Xbox owners, it’s not really a feature for people that don’t own the Xbox as it will most likely not extend the feature to other games.
Last but not the least, Windows 10 is free. It’s packed with a lot of useful features for gamers and an upgrade from Windows 7/8 will be free of cost. Most users that have already upgraded are giving positive reviews, and it’s been tested for gaming uses by Microsoft itself for a long time. Go and give it a test and see for yourself, but only time will tell if it’s truly a good OS for gaming after users review it thoroughly.
Windows 10 offers a compelling reason to upgrade from Windows 8 at the very least as it offers a much better experience than its predecessor. It also looks to be in line to be called the spiritual successor for Windows 7. However, one could very well be asked to exercise caution, especially when upgrading from Windows 7. Windows 10 is all-set to become Microsoft’s largest market shareholder in terms of OS numbers but that has never meant that the transition will be smooth for many regular gamers with driver issues being part of Nvidia-based gamer’s upgrade patterns coupled with unstable performance with various games, many of which will need stability updates for the new OS. In short, Windows 10 for a gamer is subjective to whether the person is a casual or a hardcore gamer and the game library he uses. Microsoft’s backwards compatibility feature is not really bulletproof to the extent that one can get past significant software glitches that are often bundled with a new OS. Impressively, Windows 10 seems to be doing a far better job at getting acceptance over the short period of time it has been released, giving us high hopes that a complete revolution for PC gaming might be on the cards for Microsoft given the current position that the Xbox One is in the marketplace coupled with the
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