| bonzobanana said: Why is windows 8 good? I want a small fast OS that absolutely maxes out the hardware leaving perhaps 7.5GB of memory for games. Windows 8 is pure shit to be honest. Is this going to form the basis of new marketing; 'Xbox One the only console with a bloated operating system!' I've just checked the size of my windows 7 directory on this computer - 21GB of crap! No doubt windows 8 is even worse. You'll never sell me a console on the basis of windows being the operating system. I don't want direct x 12 either I want something like mantle accessing the graphics hardware at a low level for maximum performance. Micrsoft just seem to be streaming out all this total crap about the xbox one and yet a simple look at reviews shows how hopeless the xbone is at matching ps4 resolutions or frame rates. Its like someone at Microsoft has realised they have lost the war on hardware and now they have taken the fight to software with the OS and graphics API. |
Windows 8 is the kernel level.
An operating system techically consists of a kernel, UI, hardware drivers, and a configuration file. It's pretty easy to pare down Windows to those necessary components as well as any APIs and services necessary to run the OS.
The bulk of Windows comes in the form of drivers to support a wide array of hardware, applications that don't need to exist on the Xbox One. So the games OS and the HyperVisor OS don't need to be full-fledged Windows. They need to support the necessary hardware, services, and APIs used by the OS, UI, games, and apps.
The Apps OS is most likely still a stripped down version of Windows 8, eliminating almost every application yet supporting the majority of APIs available on a Windows 8 PC. But the OS on the Xbox One, regardless of which one it is, isn't exactly the same as the OS on a Windows 8 PC. It would be horribly inefficient to stuff everything that comes with Windows 8 onto an Xbox One, especially since it can't be used and the consumer would have no way of accessing it.
Also, last time I checked, the performance difference between Windows 7 and Windows 8 wasn't humanly perceptible. Windows 8 out performed
Windows 7 when it came to application performance, copying large files, and start-up and shut-down.
