It sure does make sense. Multitasking OS's always run something in the background so it's beneficial to have more cpus/cores.

If the game will run any faster it mostly depends also on graphic driver - which were usually better on Win9x.

The performance will be affected by video/sound drivers, virtual RAM settings, etc. Wich OS have better drivers for the concrete game is unknown. XP itself is more demanding.
It's hard to predict and better to try where fps is higher.

I don't have the systems all set up, in front of me or I would try it myself. But I think a system with an original XP install*, with no ACPI would be the best test vs. 98.

*I can't recall if it's SP1 or pre-SP1 that still allows no ACPI installs.

Yeah, i figured that a clean WinXP install would be better, even if WinXP is heavier on the cpu than Win98. I asked this because i was able to get a dual socket 370 board from Gigabyte with bulged capacitors. I'm going to fix it but it made think about this question for the first time. Although it makes sense.

But yes, XP drivers might be worse than Win98 based drivers making things even again.

If it's an option, I'd go for Windows 200o instead of XP. It's lighter, and it still has multiprocessor support. 😀

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

If it's an option, I'd go for Windows 200o instead of XP. It's lighter, and it still has multiprocessor support. 😀

In my experience XP is lighter than 2000.
It's like Windows 7 vs Vista. Mostly the same technology, but more streamlined.

Since this is my first dual cpu machine, it's also the first time i'm considering installing Windows XP for Glide games. Can't wait to have the system up and running for further testing.

As someone whom deals almost exclusively in multi-cpu machines, I can affirm Kixs is correct.

Overall, a dual cpu system will FEEL much more responsive than a single. Even on games, if a 2nd cpu can take the hard drive or sound overhead, thats always a plus.

rick6 wrote:

Windows XP for Glide games

I understood XP didn't really support the Voodoo2 at all.

luckybob wrote:

Overall, a dual cpu system will FEEL much more responsive than a single.

absolutely agree, i would never wanna go back after having felt this responsiveness 1 time;

luckybob wrote:

Even on games, if a 2nd cpu can take the hard drive or sound overhead, thats always a plus.

in general probably yes, but i'd like to share 1 experience i had: after switching to a dual cpu tyan motherboard (same cpu) unreal tournament 2004 slowed down tremendously for me, it turned out the single cpu motherboard was a much more advanced construction, especially the chipset was more modern and vastly superior - only later i found that the memory throughput went down by some 20% (according to sandra or something similar);

mrau wrote:

in general probably yes, but i'd like to share 1 experience i had: after switching to a dual cpu tyan motherboard (same cpu) unreal tournament 2004 slowed down tremendously for me, it turned out the single cpu motherboard was a much more advanced construction, especially the chipset was more modern and vastly superior - only later i found that the memory throughput went down by some 20% (according to sandra or something similar);

In fact, some games behave strangely in multi cpu configurations: Warcraft III crashes without any message, Prince of Persia Warrior Within gets so fast it's unplayable and so on (of course, many of this games have patches for this, but not all), so yes, multi cpu systems are usually better for a lot of reasons, but be prepared to have some quirks from time to time.

Scali wrote:

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

If it's an option, I'd go for Windows 200o instead of XP. It's lighter, and it still has multiprocessor support. 😀

In my experience XP is lighter than 2000.
It's like Windows 7 vs Vista. Mostly the same technology, but more streamlined.

Really? Because in my experience 2k will run well on a Pentium II, while XP will crawl. Also, on my old Acer Travelmate, which had a Pentium M, I got a slightly higher framerate in Quake III under Win2k as compared to XP.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Scali wrote:

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

If it's an option, I'd go for Windows 200o instead of XP. It's lighter, and it still has multiprocessor support. 😀

In my experience XP is lighter than 2000.
It's like Windows 7 vs Vista. Mostly the same technology, but more streamlined.

Really? Because in my experience 2k will run well on a Pentium II, while XP will crawl. Also, on my old Acer Travelmate, which had a Pentium M, I got a slightly higher framerate in Quake III under Win2k as compared to XP.

If you want to run XP in a PIII and older system, you would like to stay in XP SP1. SP2 was built with a version of Visual Studio CL.exe compiler which adds optimizations to output excutables, specifically SSE2, so them can run better in P4+ and the upcoming AMD64, thus making them run slower on older CPUs. They also ditched MMX optimization code and added stuff to Kernel and HAL which runs slower in PIII and older CPUs. And it only gets worse with SP3.

Also don't forget to disable System Restore after system install.

hyoenmadan wrote:

If you want to run XP in a PIII and older system, you would like to stay in XP SP1. SP2 was built with a version of Visual Studio CL.exe compiler which adds optimizations to output excutables, specifically SSE2, so them can run better in P4+ and the upcoming AMD64, thus making them run slower on older CPUs. They also ditched MMX optimization code and added stuff to Kernel and HAL which runs slower in PIII and older CPUs. And it only gets worse with SP3.

Do you have a source with more information? I've found benchmarks before suggesting that XP's performance changed only very slightly (namely http://icrontic.com/article/does_service_pack … 2_slow_you_down and http://www.zdnet.com/article/xp-sp3-performan … ite-home-about/ ), but the first one comparing SP1 to SP2 doesn't use older hardware, so what you suggest is very intriguing.

This also raises the question of what version of the compiler was used for WinFLP and XP Embedded as well as their various service packs.

Man, I sure am glad that people around here have opened up to the idea that SP3 is kind of a resource hog. I remember that not too long ago, I voiced some concern and suggested avoiding SP3 on older systems, only to be made fun of 😜.

I have no experience with SP1, or rather it has been so long since I had WinXP with SP1 or vanilla installed that I just can't remember if there was a performance difference with SP2, so I can't comment on this. But try to avoid SP3, unless you feel like experimenting a bit 😁.

shiva2004 wrote:

some games behave strangely in multi cpu configurations: Warcraft III crashes without any message

I never noticed that on a dual p3 933 system [windows 2000]. I distinctly remember being able to run diablo 2 and warcraft 3 at the same time and alt-tab between them with no lag [which I couldn't do on an athlon 2000xp]. Not that that's especially useful other than to illustrate a kind of responsiveness I seemed to get from dual-cpu/rambus system that I did not get from a single-cpu/ddr running a cpu ostensibly twice as fast.

Long time ago though, so maybe I'm mistaken.

Ive never noticed Warcraft III having any issues on an SMP setup either.

that said, one issue Ive noticed when using a Sound Blaster Live in such a system is that FMVs skip and stutter in some games (Diablo 2 and System Shock 2 being 2 examples), which is the main reason why my SMP system uses an Audigy, where those problems do not exist.

as for WinXP SP3 , while I never tested games on a Pentium III when running it, the system in general seemed less responsive than when running SP1, and especially Win2K

Darkman wrote:

that said, one issue Ive noticed when using a Sound Blaster Live in such a system is that FMVs skip and stutter in some games (Diablo 2 and System Shock 2 being 2 examples), which is the main reason why my SMP system uses an Audigy, where those problems do not exist.

System Shock 2 is one of the games most commonly cited as freezing up entirely when multiple cores are present unless explictly patched one way or another to only use one CPU.

My i7 machine runs Warcraft III perfectly.