Reply 80 of 129, by swaaye
wrote:If it was about Direct3D you are right with NT4, but consider that in the timeframe where NT4 was quite common as 'NT OS', the early 3D games featured more likely Glide and OpenGL, whereas the 2D games just required DirectDraw 3.
Well, the only OpenGL games that come to mind are the Quakes and licensees. There were lots of D3D games starting with D3D 3. DOS was also still important at this time, but you could of course dual boot. I remember people dual booting NT4 and 95.
Win2K made some major strides in flexibility but the drivers available for the first year or so were pretty poor for most hardware. Besides bugs, performance was also considerably worse than 9x.
wrote:Yes, this whole ME vs. XP/2K thing is just off topic. What's next comparing Amiga Workbench with DOS? They are just too different to be compared directly.
I disagree. 2K has excellent compatibility for 9x games and it was supported by various game companies. It was rather popular for gaming and it did a lot of things better than the 9x series. You just needed to have enough RAM and hardware that had decent drivers (probably NV or 3dfx).
2K was popular enough to become a major problem for ATI when they released their NT-incompatible Rage Fury Maxx card. And since it had D3D support, along came articles comparing it to 9x for games. Creative's drivers started getting their negative rep too because wow were they unstable for 2K and XP for years.
But I didn't use it a lot myself. 😁 I didn't like how much RAM it needed and how hardware performed slower due to the drivers.