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

The year is 1999. High Stakes is one of the best parts of the Need For Speed series. The game still relies on DirectX 6 and offers more fun and action than visual highlights. The hurdle this time was the lack of compatibility with XP, Vista and Windows 7. We first tested the Vista patch from RejZoR, but we didn't get the game running because we only own the German localization. That's why we ultimately decided on the XP patch of the Russian RGS team, which was more stable and allowed normal measurements.

In order to start the game, you have to manually add a parameter to the call in the properties of the link. If you want to follow our experiment, you have to do this supplement in any case:

"C:Program FilesElectronic ArtsNeed for Speed – High Stakes fshs.exe" -patchrestart

With these changes, the game ran reasonably useful on Windows XP and later. Only saving screenshots with Fraps, no matter what version, led to an immediate freeze on the PC. Annoying, but for the actual benchmark only a marginal phenomenon.

Muddy textures and models with very low polygon numbers are not for the eye, but the fun and difficulty levels are still almost unmatched. We overwritten the internal settings by means of a driver profile and clocked down the graphics card due to the enormous excess performance (250/400).

Windows 98 comes first, a surprise, but it should be justified by the drivers and the old DirectX interface. In general, we found that games below DirectX8 with the original DirectX versions were consistently smoother.