Windows 10 and FFXIV

[Mercer]

Today Microsoft announced that Windows 10 will officially be released July 29th. If you have an official copy of Windows 7/8/8.1 you should have a new prompt in your task bar asking if you want to register your device for a free upgrade to 10.

 

If you agree to this registration on July 29th your computer will automatically download the upgrade to Windows 10 through the Windows Update system. This update will upgrade your system to 10 without any kind of formatting required and will import all programs and system settings.

 

Now that the announcement is out, I've been testing Windows 10 and have found a general performance improvement over Windows 7 and 8. Generally I see about a 5-10 FPS increase in most games. With XIV not only did I see an FPS increase, I found that higher settings taxed my system less, allowing me to go to high desktop with a very small difference in performance from high laptop or even low desktop.

[Aysun]

This is good information, thank you.

 

Most important question: start menu?

[Jessika Saphir]

This is good information, thank you.

 

Most important question: start menu?

That was one of their big "ads" in the pop up

 

Start Menu is back.

[LiadansWhisper]

Ooo thank you.  I had been debating accepting the upgrade or not.  Very helpful information.  

[Martiallais]

I was giving this a thought but have been a little cautious because as a friend was saying 'a free upgrade from windows, something must be wrong.'

 

Is it very swish cheesy (full of holes) or some other drawbacks possibly? I hate to be that guy (as I said, I was giving it some thought) but nothing wrong with asking around before okay'ing the little icon in my taskbar.

[Unnamed Mercenary]

I was giving this a thought but have been a little cautious because as a friend was saying 'a free upgrade from windows, something must be wrong.'

 

Is it very swish cheesy (full of holes) or some other drawbacks possibly? I hate to be that guy (as I said, I was giving it some thought) but nothing wrong with asking around before okay'ing the little icon in my taskbar.

 

THe developer previews have been pretty nice overall. If you're used to Windows 8, not too much is changing, aside from the destruction of the charms bar for a notification/toggles bar and the reintroduction of a start menu/start screen hybrid. Metro-style apps can now run in windowed mode and the settings app is a lot more powerful, as Microsoft is likely trying to bury the control panel.

 

edit: if you've got a spare hard drive or a sacrificial computer, I'd say give the latest preview a whir or install it in a virtual machine like vmware or virtual box (both have free versions) to play aorund with the new interface. That way, you can see if it's worth moving to before committing.

[Naunet]

So when it auto-updates on July 29th, we don't have to worry about backing up any files or whatnot?

[Unnamed Mercenary]

So when it auto-updates on July 29th, we don't have to worry about backing up any files or whatnot?

 

If it works like the preview, it'll first make a WinRE folder with the installation files, then reboot, migrate old files to a windows.old, install the new files, and attempt to move over your existing settings and applications. A rollback -might- be included, but that's up to microsoft.

 

As with any major computer change, I'd still make a backup "to be safe", unless you're like me and keep no irreplaceable data on your computer.

 

(Not even kidding on that last part. Someone could rip out my hard drive and format it, put it back in and I'd be back in action in about an hour or two)

[Mercer]

So, I've done some more testing with the graphics settings with the Heavensward Benchmark.

 

On my Windows 7 setup I stayed with Laptop (High) DX9 since it gives me reasonably stable FPS. I scored a 6600 (Very High)

 

On my Windows 10 setup I upgraded to DX11 with the same Laptop (High) settings and scored a 7464 (Extremely High). Surprised by the result, I upped to Desktop Maximum and ended up with 6400 (Very High)

 

So with my current modest setup (Intel i5 and 660 Nividia) I got a 15% increase in score with the same settings while upgrading to DX11. I lost less than 2% score when going from Windows 7 Laptop (High) DX9 to Windows 10 Desktop Maximum DX11.

 

The end result is a net improvement in score while improving to the DX11 engine or a net increase in overall graphics quality with a minor performance hit.

[shotgunbadger]

That's good to know, thanks for that!

[Kuzhuk]

I've been testing Windows 10 and have found a general performance improvement over Windows 7 and 8. Generally I see about a 5-10 FPS increase in most games

This is fantastic news. I didn't expect Win 10 to offer much performance over Win 8.1, which itself offered a performance boost over windows 7. I am so excited. Thanks for testing.