Gamers! Do you find windows 10 any better than 8.1?

If Windows 10 is doing great for you, awesome. I am happy for you. Everybody will have a different experience when handling with software.

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I can refer to a few:

  • Telemetry that besides the privacy issues eats up bandwidth and is the malicious hackerĀ“s wet dream

  • No control over updates. When they are downloaded and if you want to upgrade, giving you no protection against regressions. Which are happening often with win10 (which i do not blame MS. New software always has regressions, but not giving control over updates is criminal). Yeah you had a good experience with that. Me too actually since i only use them for games. But it is happening to people often

  • No control over when to restart to update and even the OS making its own decision to restart. People are still losing progress in the middle of doing something because they miss the notification that is poorly communicated at many cases. The OS should not be doing anything without asking. At least add the choice to postpone instead of restarting without warning.

  • Reseting options and configuration with updates. really just f!@# off....

  • Huge issue with consistency, retaining both old win7 gui structure and the new win10 tile-like style at the same time. Having the same functionalities to two different places is confusing at best. New and old designs are just fused in a confusing bulb. This is outright lazy design.

  • Huge amount of bloatware with the Microsoft apps.

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Idk if im u_sing a different windows 10 than everyone but after following the videos posted by teksyndicate and barnacules, you kind of remove most of the bloatware through the powershell, disable the windows update service through something like Ultimate windows tweaker and block a lot of the telemetry through something like spybot anti beacon._
I hated the stupid update schedule popping up and cant just tell it to install it when i restart which is why I disabled it.
I maybe one of the few who actually prefers 10 over 7, but then again I never liked 7 and just stayed on xp...

Windows 10 is also working for me. However I only use it to game. Everything else is done on Linux.

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I didn't do any gaming on 8.1, but while it was stable and I didn't run into many issues it still felt kind of disjointed. I always had a feeling that it was better optimized for a tablet.

Now, I started gaming on Windows 7 and updated to 10 for free (on anniversary now) and I've had no problems with it all. It is a bit like a child and you will have to take it's hand once in a while and show it the right way. But, this is just in terms of removing the apps, tiles and spyware. I've found a lot of helpful programs that remove or disable this stuff and I haven't had to install classic shell like a lot of people mention. You can just remove the tiles and resize the start menu to have it be normal. For gaming I really can't tell much of a difference though. They were both stable for me. The only game I had a problem with was Fallout New Vegas and that was the fault of an Nvidia driver.

So, I can't say if I would recommend 8.1 for gaming, but Windows 10 isn't a bad option and you will have to inevitability move to it if you want some of the stuff thats becoming exclusive to it.

If it's in an older pc (I.E. 1st gen iX intels, AM2+ and earlier) it sucks in different levels. At least in my Xeon 775 and some other machines from the era (2007-2010) it's terrible due to the lack of drivers, it kept me BSOD'ing on old games that I know run OK on XP & 7 like Skyrim and old school COD(!). In more modern PC's, with at least 8GB of RAM and a modern GPU you shouldn't run into that much issues.

Short answer: No.

Is it any worse? No.

I've had issues with Windows 10 on older hardware, that is all. On my (now my friend's) HP Envy 1105-DX I upgraded to 10 and started having issues, so now it stays on 8. On my Lenovo T420 I was having issues with 10, so I went back to 8. Both of these laptops are old-ish (~2011-2012) so I have a feeling that might be a factor. Both of these have decent processors, SSD's, and 16GB RAM, so I know power isn't an issue.

On my desktop (GTX 970, i7-6700k, ROG Maximus VIII Hero, 32GB DDR4 G.Skill RAM) I have absolutely zero issues pertaining to Windows. I do, however, have issues with NVidia drivers, but I'm in the beta program and I'm going to opt out of it soon if I can remember to.

Opinion with no facts to back up anything I say...

From a purely gaming perspective only I can't say I noticed any performance gains, but I typically don't check and benchmark my FPS. The reason I will YES I think it's better is because I wouldn't get to play Forza Horizon 3 with my buddy on his Xbox without it. :) Same for Gears of War if I get that... and Halo if anything beyond Forge comes to PC.

Non gaming, I enjoy the UI of Windows 10 over the others.

if you play DirectX 9 era games from disks some of them won't work in windows 10 because secdrv.sys is broken. yet another reason no game should ever use drm.

that said drivers work better in windows 10 then windows 8. windows 7 is still the best option it may not run DirectX 12 but vulkan is supported so odds are it will never truly feel out of date.

Unless if you've got AMD hardware for the purposes of utilizing DX12 or you want to play Windows 10 exclusive games (Such as Forza Horizon 3) Windows 10 isn't really any different.

I recently went from 7 to 8.1 and it's been great (admittedly I stripped 8.1 down) and it's been awesome for my gaming. I can play a variety of games from AAA titles to super small indie and even non steam supported games (from the disk!). If there was ever an issue with drivers on 8.1 I haven't seen them.

So far W10 only seems to have DX12 going for it when it comes to gaming, although I imagine that'll change as MS want more people on the OS.

I have a basic Toshiba laptop (i5, 8gb DDR3, iGPU) that I put W10 on and it is the fastest booting thing I have ever seen. It's got a SanDisk SSD while my main system has a PCI SSD, and it's miles faster. For light gaming it's been great!

Edit: the laptop bit

My current machine is 9 years old, has updated from XP -> Win7 -> Win10, and no major issues so far. Never bothered with Win8/8.1.
Greater issues are my hardware becoming obsolete (GPU) and driver falling into legacy (un)support.

Because of the hardware limitations I play some older titles like Rage, Blade & Soul, various other MMO.
Win10 can take longer to load, things like the default photo viewer takes freaking ages to load, whereas I can load paint.net and view an image quicker lol.
Also put in on my netbook, Toshiba NB300 and it works fine, arguably better than Win7 Starter that was on it.
Anyways, I've noticed little difference for gaming from Win7 on older harware.

Well in my opinnion i dont like Windows10 atall.
However since Windows8.1 doesnt get support anymore soon,
And the fact the DX12 will be Windows10 only.
You could basicly say that with an eye on the future Windows10 will be the better choice.
Regardless of all the privacy and telemetry crap.
But that is basicly also an issue in Windows8.1 and 7 aswell if you want to keep them up to date..
Unless Vulkan is going to be more popular and wider adopted by the AAA game devs over DX12.
Then it could mean the end of Windows10.
I have readed an article somewhere, that it seems like Windows10 is starting to loose some market share.
But yeah, if former rumors were true, that Windows10 will indeed be the last OS from MS.
Then it would mean in the long run, if you want to continue using Windows, you will end up on Windows10 anyways.

Hardware support in form of drivers for Windows 7 and 8.1 unfortunatly will end soon.

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I find windows 10 about the same as 8.1 for gaming.