Retro: Comparing Gaming Performance on 6 Windows Generations | 10 years ago

1 - Evolution in kleinen Dosen – von Windows 95 bis Windows 7 2 - Schneller Fensterputzer – der Retro-Windows-PC entsteht 3 - Zahltag mit SuperPi 4 - Schweißtreibende Synthetik – MetaBench 5 - DirectX 5 – Der THG Do-It-Yourself Benchmark 6 - DirectX 6 – Asphalt-Pixel mit Need for Speed High Stakes 7 - DirectX 7 – James Bond für Feministinnen - No One Lives Forever 8 - DirectX 8 – Mafia, der Klassiker für die ganze Famile 9 - DirectX 9 – Die Sims 2 und die Generationenfrage 10 - Gegentest – Zwei alte CPUs gegen einen aktuellen Dualcore 11 - Zusammenfassung und Fazit – Die Zeit ist abgelaufen

Let's start with a mandatory test, the absence of which would surely have been noticed and criticized – SuperPi. However, we were unable to use the current version 1.5 because this test is not stable on windows 9x versions. We chose SuperPi Mod 1.4.

Although SuperPi is not multithreaded, we have generally only tested with an active CPU core because of the better comparability. Windows 9x starts with 1 GB of RAM installed, which can use 512 MB (Windows 95) and a plentiful 800 MB (Windows 98). We made the appropriate settings manually from the system.ini configuration file to avoid memory overflows and instability. Starting with Windows 2000 and later, we equipped our test system with 2 GB of RAM, as it made no difference whether there is 2 GB or 4 GB of memory in the computer.

The swap file was generally set to a fixed value and moved to a second physical hard drive. We have also disabled all unnecessary services and waived the indexing service and Superfetch for Windows Vista and Windows 7 to avoid interference. In order not to give any "outliers" in the test results any greater importance, a total of 10 runs were measured for each operating system and the result was then averaged.

Between Windows 95 / Windows 98 and Windows 2000, both SuperPi tests show a not inconsiderable performance boost. The distances between 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7 are smaller, with XP just ahead of Windows 7 in all situations. Vista is just ahead of Windows 2000 and behind Windows 7.

However, we see the reasons for the performance drop of Windows 9x less in the pure computing power, but in the much worse storage connection of these two systems. This finding is also supported by the following tests with MetaBench.