ZDnet editor Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has benchmarked Windows 8 RTM against Windows 7 and found some interesting results. While the general performance of Microsoft's latest OS isn't a big improvement over Windows 7, when it comes to transcoding of audio and video Windows 8 beats Windows 7 big time.
Where an audio transcoding process took Window 7 49.3 seconds, it took only 41.2 seconds on the Windows 8 installation. When a video was transcoded, Windows 8 was more than 30 seconds faster. The Windows 8 RTM versions are also quicker than e.g. the Customer Preview release.
As Windows 8 is only just out, it's expected that graphic card manufacturers will continue to tweak their drivers which might increase performance even more. Both AMD and Intel currently have Windows 8 WHQL drivers out.
