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

We have spent some time considering which benchmarks we can use for this section. Since the span between the systems is very large and there is hardly a useful application that works stable from Windows 95 to Windows 7 in a single version, we finally resorted to the relatively unknown test "Metabench 0.98" of 7Byte. In our opinion, however, this benchmark program is very well suited to test all systems on a uniform basis because of its bandwidth.

We ran Metabench on each system with 10 runs and then recorded the averaged results for the most interesting areas.

Windows 98 is surprisingly just ahead of Windows 7, Vista and XP. Windows 2000 can keep up, but it's slower than Windows 95. Multi threaded Windows 7 is faster than Vista and XP.

Again, a similar picture. As long as the memory doesn't matter, Windows 98 is very thin in front. However, the differences are in the range of less than one percent.

Here, Windows 7 is ahead of the XP and Vista operating systems. The old systems are hopeless and the hierarchy is restored.

These results clearly prove why Windows 9x was basically without a chance on SuperPi. To test whether it was due to our modified driver installation or Windows 9x per se, we repeated the memory test on an old PC with original ICH6 soutbridge. The difference between the two chipsets is much more narrow than in the measured results of our test. Which should make it clear that the deficits in Windows 9x itself are.