PCMag.Com - An article like this requires a lot of caveats and many large grains of salt. But we were interested to see what would happen if we compared the performance of a very early version of Microsoft’s upcoming desktop OS with Apple’s released one, and we thought you would be, too. Windows 8 is far from finished, but its creators have made bold claims about performance. I’ve already compared the Windows 8 Developer Preview with Windows 7, which presented its own challenges.
Comparing with Mac OS X introduces even more hazards. On one hand the version of Windows 8 we test with here, the Developer Preview is far from finished—it’s not even ready to be called a “beta”—and code optimization is usually among the last tasks in any software project. On the other hand, we have Apple’s fully baked and optimized Mac OS X Lion, which has been a released product for over six months. Add to this that Lion is finely tuned to mesh with the Apple hardware it runs on, compared with Windows, which must run on a huge array of different hardware combinations from many vendors.
Despite all the warnings, as you’ll see, Windows 8 was surprisingly up to the challenge. And indeed, some of Windows 8′s developers’ big claims are that it will take up less memory, run fewer CPU processes, and boot faster, all of which should add up to better performance.
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