Performance comparsion - Windows 98SE vs. ME (1/8)
Once again Microsoft is "blessing" us with a new version of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. Windows ME (Millennium Edition), as it will be called, is scheduled to hit the stores on September 14 here in Germany. Reading this you might be asking yourself "So should I upgrade or not?". Well, as expected there isn't really all that much new - aside from "Internet Editions" of Solitaire et al. Microsoft has indeed also made a few cosmetic changes to the look and feel and done some fine-tuning under the hood, so to speak. Plug&Play, for example, now works a lot better than it did with Win98SE. Microsoft has also taken a close look at the networking capabilities. Yet the most pressing question for gamers is bound to be "Which version is faster?" ME or Win98SE? We were wondering the same thing, so we decided to do some testing and comparing. Windows ME comes with DirectX 7.1 preinstalled, while Win98SE is currently at version 7.0a. This isn't necessarily a weakness, though, as no major changes or improvements are expected until the release of the next version, DirectX 8, later this year. It remains to be seen whether this new version will also bless us with performance improvements. Performance seems to fluctuate with every new beta that turns up around the internet, so who can say? Either way, the future will tell. So back to the present and the matter at hand! To discover the differences in performance - if any - a fresh installation of Win98SE challenged a newly installed ME to a duel. The usual PIII 866 system built around the ASUS CUSL2 (i815E) board with 128MB PC133 served as the dueling grounds for our contestants. All testing was done with sound disabled. The following video cards were used:
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Copyright: 10.09.2000 -
RIVA
Station 2000 - Lars Weinand Translation by Benjamin Kraft URL of this Article: www.rivastation.com/wincompare_e.htm - If you want to link to it, please use this URL! :-) |
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