Which OS for gaming?

[Lord Prism]

Abit SE6 Mobo
Pentium Celeron 600Mhz (OC~815Mhz)
256MB RAM PC-100
C.L. Riva TNT2 Ultra 32MB (2x)
Maxtor 8.4Gb - Pri-Master

Am with Win98 SE now and pleased with accelerated gaming. Will probably switch to Win ME or Win 2000 as an upgrade, but would have to do that and decrease gaming performance.

Which is best OS for gaming?


Thanks in advance...

[Floppyman]

I suggest that you stay with 98SE if you game a lot. Why? Well I've been running both or dual booting between the 2 for quite some time and have been gaming on both as well. Win98SE is better for gaming than win2k, period. Since windows 2000 was designed from NT it really wasn't intented for gaming. I'm not saying no games will play in 2000, but chances are most of your older win95/98 games won't work in 2000. HL, CS, Q3 and other newer games will work fine mostly though, but you'll still get better performance out of 98. I also see you have a TNT2 Ultra videocard. I at first had a TNT2 Ultra too and I coudn't get any open gl games to work properly under win2k so, I ended buying a Radeon that works just fine. Hope this helps you out a bit.

[Lord Prism]

Thanks.

Ok, sounds like Win 2000 wouldn't be a better deal for me. What about Win ME?

[Tiretool]

And I would second that nomination for 98 SE. Not much isn't compatible with it, but much is incompatible with Win 2000 and ME.

[Prader Willi]

Firingsquad.com ran a comparison of Win '98 and Win ME and found that both OS's ran games at exactly the same speed. They did not find any reason to upgrade.

I also read an article on Zdnet that said that Win ME crashes more than Win '98.

Instead of upgrading to ME, use the money to buy a new game :).

[HAL9000]

Yea, but wasn't it also Zdnet that claimed that you cannot defrag under ME without corrupting system files everytime. Continuing the claim that you had to manually restore them each time. I've been running ME since August on both of my computers and have found it to be more stable, my reasoning, my wife can crash a computer just by sitting next to it and ME is crashing far less, she was the one that commented that she cannot remember the last crash since the upgrade to ME. I run all my games and software including my Spot Technologies scanner which only has support for Win95 since they are out of business. Some of the games bench the same, some faster. ME is definitely faster than Win98. Both of my ME systems run 24/7 and stable which is pretty good since they both originally had Win98 which I did an install over top to Win98SE and then used the full version of ME to install over top for the upgrade. I think ME gets a bad rap because it's new. I remember the screaming on how bad Win98 was and that you would be crazy to upgrade and how much more stable Win95 was. Sure, there was a few things different, maybe you needed a driver upgrade or two, ME isn't any different, but I also remember the complaints about the upgrades to Win95 from Win3.1.

[Prader Willi]

Hal: I've always respected your opinion and was interested to read your comments.

My main point is that there does not appear to be any reason to upgrade from Win '98 to Win ME to improve gaming.

Here is the url for the benchmarks reported by Firingsquad that clearly show that the two OS's run at identical speeds for the following programs and tests:

Ziff Davis WinBench 99- CPUMarks, FPUMarks, High-End Disk, Business Graphics, High-End Graphics

SiSoft Sandra- CPU Dhrystones, FPU Whetstones, MMX, SSE/3Dnow!, CPU and FPU memory bandwidth

3DMark 2000 16-bit color 800X600, 1024X768
3DMark 2000 32-bit color 800X600, 1024X768

Unreal Tournament 32-bit color 640X480, 800X600, 1024X768, 1280X1024, 1600X1200

Quake III Retail 1.17 Fastest 640X480, 800X600, 1024X768, 1280X1024, 1600X1200
Quake III Retail 1.17 Normal 640X480, 800X600, 1024X768, 1280X1024, 1600X1200
Quake III Retail 1.17 High Quality 640X480, 800X600, 1024X768, 1280X1024, 1600X1200

http://firingsquad.gamers.com/features/winmeeval/page6.asp


BTW: I run ME on my laptop-- never had a crash with ME running office or a statistics program

[Edited by Prader Willi on 02-09-2001 at 05:41 PM]

[HAL9000]

I agree, I wouldn't upgrade to ME just for the sake of gaming. The way the original question was stated, he has 98 and will probably be switching over to either ME or 2000, so it sounds like an OS upgrade is in the works anyway. Personally, I choose ME over 2000 and I was merely stating that I believe that ME is getting a bad rap from people that aren't willing to sit down and try to figure out why ME isn't working and blame the OS instead. I have currently set up a Linux web server and knowing nothing about Linux, don't go around flaming it's a POS when I haven't given it a go to figure out the problem. Maybe I'm more stubborn than some as I will take days, weeks, months, whatever to get something going that I know should work.

As for the published benchmarks, I think it comes down to the individual machine. I'm getting better Q3, MDK2, Incoming, Mechwarrior4 framerates than I did with Win98. I'm not saying huge increases or anything, but noticable. My 3DMark2000 score went up significantly. Other games seem to be about the same.

[Edited by HAL9000 on 02-09-2001 at 06:04 PM]

[Lord Prism]

I love it when there's are animated post responses.

I'm upgrading the OS.
The main use for this system is gaming (Q3, UT, MechWarr, etc).
I'm concerned about:
a. Will I lose gaming performance?
b. Is the upgrade worth it in increased stability and performance if my gaming suffers?
c. If I do upgrade, which would be better; 2k or ME?

Thanks again,

[HAL9000]

Well, I stand my ground for the use of WinME over Win2K;

a) No you won't lose any performance and there might be a chance for a small increase.

b) Everyone has different experiences, but I find ME to be VERY stable (my systems are on 24/7) and the overall performance is much better.

c) I would say go with ME for a gaming system, leave 2000 to the business sector.

[Prader Willi]

Just a thought-- Windows XP is supposed to be out sometime in the second half of this year. Why not wait for that OS rather than possibly upgrading twice in the same year.