Should You Upgrade to Windows 8.1 For Battlefield 4?

We have a technical rundown on whether Battlefield 4 performs better on Windows 7, or upgraded to Windows 8. This assessment also takes into account video cards, resolutions, offline and online use.

The cards used for the test were an AMD Radeon R9 290X and an nVidia GeForce GTX 780, and the resolutions used were 2560 x 1600 and 1920 x 1080 (1080p).

They verified that there are performance advantages to using Windows 8.1 over Windows 7, for both cards, consistently across the board. Interestingly enough, in spite of the work AMD has put into DX11.1, the nVidia Geforce GTX 780 performed better after the upgrade to 8.1. On the side, this was not mentioned in this particular benchmarking test, but this advantage may be due to nVidia’s work on optimizing Battlefield 4, and may not necessarily be true of other games.

Moving on, image quality does not receive the significant boost that performance does from an OS upgrade. Regardless of resolution or OS, the game looks the same.

Gameplay also receives a conspicuous upgrade from moving on to Windows 8.1. Whereas online multiplayer could become choppy under Windows 7, with occasional random pauses in the framerate, these issues were gone on Windows 8.1, again, more conspicuously so on the GTX 780.

Ultimately, however, this is not enough to absolutely recommend an OS upgrade to play Battlefield 4. Those people who are deep into the game, and are getting it for online multiplayer, definitely have to upgrade. For the rest of us, however, there isn’t enough added in to justify it. The casual observer will recognize a serious graphical upgrade, but that’s something that’s just not provided here.