If you have a brand new, high-end computer, and all your audio-related hardware has drivers that fully support Windows 8, you might see a 1-2% increase in DAW performance at most. (And by “DAW performance” I mean your computer’s ability to deliver audio under an extreme music processing load without audible pops and drops in your main outs.)
Computers 3 years old or more don’t see any audio-related performance improvements at all (since the modest performance gains between Win 7 and Win 8 seem to only be noticeable in DAWs on the very latest chipsets, processors, and RAM), although it probably won’t be worse than Win 7, assuming your drivers are solid.
Most of the glowing/impressed reports I’ve heard from people who do music on Windows 8 either got Win 8 with a brand new computer (so haven’t been able to compare it to Win 7 on the same hardware), or jumped straight from old XP or Vista installs to a fresh install of Windows 8- and I can totally understand being stoked about Win 8 if you’ve never used Win 7, and your computer has enough RAM and CPU power to showcase its strengths.
There are a lot of misconceptions about how lean Windows 8 supposedly is, and apparently we have to blame Microsoft for a lot of that. The fact is it uses about the same amount of CPU, RAM and system resources as Windows 7 does to do its job. They just reshuffled a number of system tasks into “service host” processes, so you will see fewer things listed in Task Manager- but the OS is still doing the exact same amount of work! I and others have also noticed that it’s a bit “busier” than Win 7 when idle; the HD spins more often and the CPU usage doesn’t sit quietly at zero percent as often as a resting Win 7 system will. (But again, this doesn’t seem to affect DAW performance; it just doen’t sync with the hype.)
The only noticeable performance-related improvement I’ve seen with Windows 8 is that the OS and apps boot a little faster. But unless you spend most of your day booting Windows and launching apps, this is not a compelling reason to upgrade a stable Win 7 music production PC to Windows 8.
If you are getting a brand new PC- Win 8 is great! If you’ve got a multi-core CPU, at least 3GB of installed RAM, a 64-bit capable PC, and you’re still stuck on XP or Vista- you will also probably be really pleased by Win 8.
For people like me who ONLY work in Desktop mode and don’t wish to be bothered with the Win 8 start screen, the free tool ClassicShell will get you a Win 7 (or even XP or Vista) style Start menu and give you the option to bypass the Win 8 start at boot time. I’m also hearing that the upcoming point release of Win 8 will include a Start button again, so we’ll see about that.