Curious, who do you know that still uses 8.1 in this current year? Still has extended support till 2023.
May want to try reuploading it and see if there’s a performance difference in SL
Everybody I know jumped ship for 10 pretty much immediately. I think there’s probably more hacked-into-modernity Win7 holdouts than 8.x users. In terms of reputation 8 is for practical purposes the Vista of the 10’s.
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I suspect that 8.1 users at this point are mainly corporate. At my last job we kept using Windows XP up until late 2013, about 6 months before before Microsoft pulled the plug on XP support. We switched to Windows 8; they were using 8.1 when I left 4 years ago and I would bet they’re still using it now.
For the software development work we did, switching to a new major version of Windows meant switching to a new version of Visual Studio, and switching versions of a bunch of other tools as well, and that meant making all kinds of software updates to accomodate changes in the tools and a ton of regression testing to make sure nothing broke as a result. Nobody wanted to go through all that voluntarily - we only did it when someone like MS forced our hand.
Shadowlands is so trivial to run it seems like it would be hard to tell any difference on any config. I mainly play on a Ryzen 7 1700 and GTX 1660 ti at 1440p high detail, but I also regularly play on a second system hooked up to my living room TV that is a sickly old FX 6300 and GTX 960 4gb that I run at 1080p good detail. Both 75hz lock reliably, one thing WoW got going for it is being 17 years old. Don’t know how you would generate a really useful Win 10 vs Win 8.1 comparison, even just doing like a skybox test still probably a lot of interference in performance from things you can’t see, am I running 1 fps slower on this config because it genuinely is 1% weaker or is it tracking 1% more player data this run? It’s why MMOs aren’t in professional benchmarker suites.
We are still using 7 especially for the presses. They are slowly starting to update things to 10 but we pretty much skipped right over 8.
Windows 8 was a watershed for Microsoft. That’s when they began to realize that Windows OS was a commodity item. I remember being shocked when they offered Win 8 upgrades direct to consumers for $39 or $49 during ‘beta.’ I made sure to upgrade the Win 2000 and XP on my computers.
Tried to use the old key to reinstall 8.1 recently on a spare parts computer but sadly Microsoft now says it’s an invalid key. The other 8.1 license was upgraded years ago to Win 10 on one of the computers I use now. I’d expect it WoW to run slower on Win 8.x than on Win 10 anyway.
I hate it when people say this - there’s a huge difference in performance on powerful hardware and potato hardware in this game.
Yeah I don’t mind that it finally clicked with MS that they weren’t going to be able to squeeze $120+ out of users every few years, that part was good. It was the rest of Windows 8 that was vociferously rejected — the Metro UI theme, the Start screen replacing the Start menu, and general phonification. Lots of parallels between Vista+7 and 8+10 in terms of MS attempting a large UI/UX change, those changes flying like a rock, and then having to backpedal it in the next release.
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Gonna be hard for some new hardware. Drivers will be difficult.
Microsoft still allows you to get the installer though.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows8ISO
Not picking on you, Chroesire, but did they jump ship because they wanted to, or because Microsoft pushed a stealth patch that would eventually upgrade 7, 8, and 8.1 machines to Win10?
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2922604/microsoft-re-re-re-issues-controversial-windows-10-advertising-patch-kb-3035583.htmlYep, still annoyed at that. Yep, I’m that kind of person. And yep, I still use 8.1.
Personally I jumped to 10 as soon as the free upgrade was available. I don’t regret it, mostly.
Yep I remember, and it was all over all the tech news websites at that point in time, usually with links instructing how to avoid the update. I doubt many technically competent people who didn’t want to upgrade to 10 got upgraded to 10 — the vast majority of auto-updated machines likely belonged to less technical users.