Windoze 7 vs 8.1 vs 10
michaelxm_a1dddd836b
Posts: 123
Hi everyone... I want to ask you more experienced DS users..which seems to work best for you? I am using Windows 7 64 Pro.. but what about thew other 2? To me it seems like Microsoft is trying to convert the PC into a giant smart phone. Any input about if those have better speeds, etc, or not? Thanks
Post edited by michaelxm_a1dddd836b on
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The big difference is that Windows 10 is the only one of those that will have DirectX 12 installed and DirectX 12 gives very good speed improvments for DirectX 12 compliant vidia cards. If you read some of the reviews of this forthcoming AMD Vega video card you'll see those improvements in action. No, you may not choose to manually install DirectX 12 on Windows 7 or Windows 8 either. Microsoft want's to EOL old OSes.
Windows 8 was the attempt to turn the PC into a giant smart phone. Know MS is building a Win32 bridge to the new UI but also changed the UI so that users had a choice between the touch UI and the old type Desktop UI.
There is definately an effort by MS to get all SW development to migrate to the UWP but that is a long ways off if it ever happens. For a typical independant App/Game developer that just does this as a moonlighting type hobby it makes much more sense to develop for Windows 10 and the UWP because that developed code base would be much easier to port to Android,iOS, and osX target platforms.
As far as DAZ Studio itself it doesn't matter too much for now which one you use but like iRay has left 3DL material lagging far behind in new products so too eventually will nVidia leave Windows 7 and Windows 8 behind. Intel is much faster to drop support of HW. My EP121 Tablet PC (which had the lithium ion battery burn up and explode, melting and cracking the gorilla glass screen but the battery's foil wrapper prevented battery shrapnel from escaping) was dropped from having Intel or ASUS further develop it's Intel HD graphics drivers for Windows 8 and Windows 10 within 1 1/2 year of the product's commercial release.
My parents insisted on upgrading to 10 because it was free. I've been fighting this monster of a buggy inefficient OS on Mom's work computer every since.
(Did you know it can spontaneously have its start button stop working? The address bar won't work either and there's no known fix that works for everyone. Haha! Good luck getting to any program that doesn't have a desktop shortcut! We eventually did fix it. Using repair console. Screw Windows 10.)
I personally am still on Windows 7 64 bit Pro, hoping that Microsoft will at some point come out with a good productivity OS that works well offline and isn't made of bloated ugly app tiles. I would already be on some version of Linux if it was possible to do so with the hardware and software that I absolutely have to have for work. I have a 1080 GTX and it is quite fast even on 7.
nonesuch.. would the directx 12 mostly apply to higher end graphics card, but not much else? If so.. no danger of me ever affording those cards. But maybe down the road they will come down in prices like most do in time.. I may however install 10 on this PC just to test drive..as I am building a new AM3+ one..so I can move up to 8 core CPU power..SickleYield.. My Mom has 10 and I sat down and tried it out and instantly hated it..lol It's like trying to solve a CSI case just to do the basics..and good luck finding where your latest program install went. So for now I will stick with WIn 7 too. To be honest I widh they would have kept supposrt xp.. still the best in my book for being user friendly..except the 32 bit limitations.. the 64 one was a disaster..
I do get the Explorer crashes occasionally that Sickle Yield is talking about too but that bug has been in Windows since Windows 7. I don't remember the bug being in Windows Vista though. I can get osX to lock up even worse but it's rare the osX user that makes even a small iota of the demands on osX that even grandmothers make on the various versions of Windows.
As far as how far back DirectX 12 supports nVidia and ATI/AMD video cards it goes pretty far back but I recommend that you research yourself which video cards are supported. There are actually Wikipedia pages with huge tables of video cards and what version of DirectX and openGL they run. Just search for those pages. I think you could for AMD and nVidia easily and safely go back and use 5 years old and some older video cards but please look it up.
However, for Intel HD Graphics integrated GPUs you must use an Intel CPU/GPU generation that is the Haswell architecture generation or newer. I think Haswell architecture is Intel 5th Generation of the i3 / i5 / i7 line of CPUs. I believe though even Haswell CPU/GPUs are now 3 years old.
The big thing about Windows is you have to try & avoid the temptation to install alot of Windows Store Apps and also too many Win32 programs that install these 'startup' processes that fill your CPU with programs constantly checking to download updates and other busy body stuff.
Nowadays, if you have an SSD drive as your main drive & use Windows OneDrive to backup settings and such, you can clean new install in 4 - 12 hours. LOL, I leave my DAZ 3D DIM installer running overnight (but I save all my DAZ install files on USB drive so I don't have to redownload 161GB of install files) to install my 1840 DAZ products.My preferred method is to new install with every Windows 10 'major update'.
I guess since I am programmer Windows 10 or osX or UNIX OSes and so on don't bother me. For me it's like, well, I want DirectX 12 and I want Vulkan and I want Metal and so I must have the latest versions of Windows 10, Android, and osX to get those. Oh, I guess Linux too but I don't mess with it much anymore.