XP VS 2K Gaming

[Markoman01027]

Hey everybody,

I have heard that games perform better in XP than in Windows 2000.

Why is that so? I really think it more depends on what hardware you have rather than what operating system you have..

TIA

[aym]

I think more games are compatible with Windows XP, XP is designed to be a home user OS, unlike 2000, so game developers target XP.

As for performance, both hardware and software affect performance, and as I said, game devs optimize their games for XP, because it's the home user OS.

[lil Jimmie]

My 2 cents.... newer games are generally more compatible with XP and XP is more effecent with newer hardware so in the end XP is faster if you are using newer hardware.

[tomster2300]

Also XP wont allow the entire OS to crash when a game goes bad. Also xp was supposed to Microsoft's greatest OS yet and was targeted directly to the home user who didnt know much about computers.

[Nuclear Krusader]

Besides, Win2k is old, and some games have problems with it. It was never the most compatible and game friendly OS in the first place.

[RJ]

Well, actually I don't believe that Games are somehow optimized for Windows XP. They aren't really written for "XP", they're written for DirectX.
None of my DirectX-based-games gave my trouble in Windows 2000. Now the performance. . well I didn't bench it, but I couldn't tell a difference just by playing. XP being more efficient with hardware can be a reason that games are indeed faster.
But Windows 2000 won't allow to crash completely either. That was Win9x. Windows 2000 and XP are quite similar, and it was Windows 2000 that was designed to run the newest games by incorporating DirectX, unline the predecessor Windows NT.

About XP being designed for the home user unlike 2000: Well, there's XP home and XP pro, and pro is not designed for the home user. The core of both is identical, and is based on Windows 2000. M$ intention was to release a Windows 2000 Personal Edition, targeting for the home user, but it never happened. It first happened with XP. But Windows 2000 was meant to be the end of the Win9x line so it was designed to run games nicely.

RJ

[Jaggannath]

I'm with RJ... I think the games aren't optimised for XP, but rather the hardware is. And he's spot on with the comments on 2000, XP was kind of the source for XP, and was a major deviation from Win9x

[aym]

Originally posted by RJ
Well, actually I don't believe that Games are somehow optimized for Windows XP. They aren't really written for "XP", they're written for DirectX.
...
RJ

I remember having many games that didn't work with XP when it was released, or that the performance wasn't that good, like Max Payne, later a patch was released to fix the problem, and Max Payne is a DirectX game.

When programming a game using DirectX, developers still need to use APIs other than DirectX to do stuff like file IO, memory management and so on, and here, developers may use functions that are not supported by Win2K, or were updated since then, so the game performs better under Windows XP.

That's what I mean by optimizing.

And Windows 2000 running as a server (file server or web server...) is quite popular, I have yet to find a web site hosted on Windows XP, so I find it hard to believe that Windows XP is more efficient with hardware.

[lil Jimmie]

Originally posted by aym_7
And Windows 2000 running as a server (file server or web server...) is quite popular, I have yet to find a web site hosted on Windows XP, so I find it hard to believe that Windows XP is more efficient with hardware.

The lack of activation with 2K prolly plays a larger roll to it's popularity than how efficient an OS might be for a server.