Print this article

Win98SE vs Win ME : Gaming


Date
: 10/16/00 – 12:43:26 AM

Author
:

Category
: Operating System

Introduction :

To most of you guys there’s only one question to ask : should I get Win ME or not ?
Well … at first sight there are no remarkable differences between Win ME & Win98SE apart from some visual differences. I noticed things like the Win2k desktop icons and a Win2k alike network environment. Looks like Microsoft also improved Plug&Play because Win ME automaticly detects my Alcatel ADSL card which was not the case when I used Win98SE.

But … apart from all these visual differences hardcore gamers will only ask one simple question : Which Windows version has the fastest game performance? ME or Win98SE ?

I’ll try to give you the best possible answer to this question!

The Facts :

If you don’t look at the hardware you are using, then game performance in every Windows-based operating system is dependent of 2 major things :

1.) videocard driver 2.) DirectX version

1.) Videocard driver ?

I advise everyone to always use the latest drivers of the videocard you are using. However this does not always guarantee or result in more frames per second; sometimes a new videodriver is also built to increase stability which is also an import issue for every real gamer.

2.) DirectX ?

The Win ME package comes with DirectX 7.1. The newest (already rather old,you could say) & final version for Win98SE is DirectX 7.0a. Oh, and what about DirectX 8 you’re thinking … well because there’s no final version for Win ME or Win98SE yet (only Beta’s); I chose the keep the standard (DirectX 7-based) versions on the benchmarks!

To be really honest, I did the benchmark test on a friend’s system for the one and only (good!) reason that he is the proud owner of the ‘Guillemot Hercules 3D Prophet II’ videocard. I used his system instead of mine because Tim is doing a review of that godlike videocard very soon!

Test system :

CPU : Intel PIII-933 (FSB:7x133Mhz)

Mainboard : Asus CUV4X 1006 bios

Chipset : VIA 694Z Chipset (4in1 4.25a driver)

Video : Guillemot Hercules 3D Prophet II 64MB (deto 6.18)

Memory : 128MB PC133 (2-2-2)

Harddisk : IBM 20GB UDMA66 @ 7200RPM

OS : Win ME – Win98SE

Benchmarks:

Quake 3 :

Well, it looks like both operating system perform pretty much the same as you can see here. Although you can see little more FPS when using Windows ME. But as it’s only an avarage 2 FPS gap between the 2 OS’s @ the same screen resolution, I doubt you’ll see that world of difference!
Let’s check out the 3DMark2000 bench …

3DMark2000 :

Let’s face the facts : this benchmark confirms what was already quite obvious after the previous Q3a test; there’s little or no increase of game performance when using the Windows ME edition.

Conclusion :

Should you update your Win98SE with Win ME ?? As you can see on the benchmarks the game performance between both operating systems is almost the same. If I’m really optimistic, I can say performance is slightly better in Win ME. But it’s a negligible factor though!
So if you have no troubles with your current Win98SE installation, I suggest you stick with that OS. However if you plan to set up a fresh installation of an OS & you need game performance; then I suggest to use Win ME!