Windows 10 Vs Windows 8 Game Performance Review, Major Titles On Microsoft's New OS

Name: Microsoft Windows 10
Brand: Microsoft

by Shawn Sanders — Tuesday, August 18, 2015, 12:02 PM EDT

Unigine Heaven 4.0 And Grand Theft Auto V

Heaven 4.0 is a GPU stress test built from the Unigine 3D game engine. It supports DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11 and OpenGL. It features hardware tessellation for DirectX 11 as well as advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion), volumetric cumulonimbus cloud generation and a dynamic sky using light scattering.

Unigine Heaven v4.0 Benchmark

Pseudo-DirectX 11 Gaming

Here again we see virtually the same performance on both Windows 10 and Windows 8 as each OS handles the test glitch-free—both installations hit around 50-ish frames per second with our GeForce GTX Titan X graphics card. However, Win10 does pull away with another marginal win.

GTA V Performance

More Direct X 11 Testing

Rockstar hit one out the park with the latest Grand Theft Auto. Not only did the GTA V receive rave reviews, it is running on one of most scalable game engines currently available, catering to a wide range of system configurations. However, this engine demands cutting-edge hardware under the hood for 1440p resolutions and above, even on the PC platform.

Take a gander at that. It’s not much but we’ll take any talking point we can get at this rate. GTAV is the first in our cache of tests to show Win10 apparently taking a minor loss. Sure, it’s only a single frame or two, but it is a degradation none-the-less. We ran this test several times, figuring a single frame of difference would flip-flop back and forth in favor of either system. No, Windows 8.1 consistently beat the younger Win10--each time by only a frame or two. While this is notable, it’s far from significant. Hopefully, a (remotely) possible DirectX 12-supported GTAV update will allow us to tell a different story in the future.