Suppose that you have an older graphics card--say, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 or an AMD Radeon HD 4850. Neither runs current-generation games especially well, and both make more noise and consume more power than modern graphics cards. Currently, you can find tempting sale prices for one-generation-old GPUs such as Nvidia's GeForce GTX 460 or AMD's Radeon HD 6850. But if you're thinking of moving to Windows 8, it may make sense to consider a current-generation graphics card, such as the or the . Both of those models support DirectX 11.1, which Windows 8 also supports.

Admittedly, DX11.1 offers only incremental upgrades from DirectX 11. But many of those features promise greater efficiencies in the Direct3D pipeline (bigger constant buffers, for example). DirectX 11.1 also adds stereoscopic 3D support. For Windows 8, the key feature that DirectX 11.1 brings to the table is better 2D performance through Direct2D, which means that windows pop onto the screen more fluidly, and overall text rendering is much snappier.

Windows 8 supports touch and gesture recognition in a big way. Nevertheless, though you may be tempted to upgrade to a multitouch desktop display, only a handful of models are available on the market today--and the ones that do exist are either quite expensive or painfully small. But some nifty touch-enabled interface devices are available (or are coming very soon), and they have the potential to work more effectively with Windows 8.