AROWANA - Benchmarking Eight Windows Versions on Pentium 3/4

Created on March 03, 2019
Indexed on December 19, 2022 at 11:17 AM

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On a well-equipped system, it seems trivial as to which version of Windows you'd install apart from concerns over hardware and software compatibility.

Does it really make a difference if you install one specific operating system to run your desired programs, or is it a waste of time trying to get everything to work with it?

Remarks

1. Windows 95 can only address up to 768MB of RAM, so a line MaxPhysPage=30000 is added under [386Enh] in SYSTEM.INI.
2. Windows 95 also requires a fast CPU fix to be applied on certain systems to avoid a protection error.
3. Windows 9x may exhibit some problems on systems with more than 512MB of RAM unless MaxFileCache=524288 is added under [vcache] in SYSTEM.INI.
4. The sound card used in the Pentium 4 benchmarks is different in Windows 2000 and ME because I couldn't find a reliable driver for the other one that wouldn't constantly use 25% of the CPU.
5. For most of the Pentium III benchmarks, I used the default OpenGL renderer because it didn't cross my mind at the time of recording to supply updated MiniGL drivers.
6. In all benchmarks, updated versions of Internet Explorer were installed. Additional benchmarks were run on the Pentium III to measure differences between having an updated IE version and not having one, but they were minute, possibly due to the abundance of RAM in the tested system.
7. The Pentium III optimizations were not available in 3DMark 99 MAX under Windows 95 because it is not aware of the XMM register set which is used by SSE-capable CPUs. It is possible to make use of SSE in Windows 95 by loading a certain program on startup, but running more than one program using SSE instructions at once will cause data corruption or crashes.

Most of the benchmarks were completed in July 2018, but the rest of the video was finished on March 3rd, 2019, then originally published on September 4th.

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Comments

I've heard you can get DirectX 5 Beta to install on NT4, and even DirectX 6, though I can't be sure.

cybertruk: It is a hack though, no?

Also DirectX is

DirectX has always been shaky from the beginning. It was Microsoft's belated answer to making Windows the dominant platform for computer games (which did serve a good purpose of transitioning users away from the DOS environment), and because it came with it out of the box, developers would take advantage of its rendering APIs natively without considering alternative renderers.

Microsoft is also very inconsistent with software releases too, like how they have the 16-bit version of IE5 for Windows 3.1x, but no proper 32-bit version built with NT 3.51 in mind like with IE3. IE5 came out in '99, and by that point, NT 3.x was history in a lot of people's minds (most of whom haven't used it at all) and Microsoft was closing in on a release date for Windows 2000.

Kugee - December 30, 2022 at 04:07 AM

One thing I couldn't help but notice when watching videos about Threadripper is that a lot of the charts I've seen are completely static, no animation. It's really strange... were they using a Threadripper for editing? Meanwhile when I was exporting the revised edition of Sunfish, I saw that all 32 threads on my secondary workstation were heavily utilized during some visually complex parts while exporting to a lossless UtVideo AVI.

I think many high tier tech YouTubers (going by numbers only) which have access to insanely powerful CPUs appear to underutilize them in editing. I've said this before, but when you're making a video, you need to do things that really leverage visuals. If you're not, you may as well make a blog post that takes only the power of a Pentium MMX to assemble. Just something that came to my mind; it shouldn't be the case that I as someone who hardly has much of a reach can edit fancier charts than those statistically further ahead of me, but it is.

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