I always just assumed W98 is simply slower. I didn't do extensive testing, but I also noticed with a couple of my graphics card that they don't score as high in W98 as they do in XP. Something like a 20% difference with Ti4200 for example.

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-09-06, 10:42:

I always just assumed W98 is simply slower. I didn't do extensive testing, but I also noticed with a couple of my graphics card that they don't score as high in W98 as they do in XP. Something like a 20% difference with Ti4200 for example.

Yeah, I've seen that on other systems as well. But the difference between Win98 and WinXP was usually 10% at most.

In my case, the performance gap is much bigger. And Phil was able to get results under Win98 which are comparable to my WinXP benchmarks. So something must be amiss on my system.

Update: I was able to to get USB 2.0 working by installing NUSB 3.3 and then manually updating the "PCI Universal Serial Bus" entry from Device Manager. I've also installed the unofficial ICH9 Win98 drivers from here in case that matters.

As for the GPU performance issue, I think it may be due to how Catalyst 6.2 interacts with this particular motherboard/chipset. For testing purposes, I replaced the ATi X800GTO with my old Nvidia 6600GT (both PCIe). At first, I was unable to install the 81.98 drivers, and they wouldn't recognize the card. But I then forced the installation by updating it from Device Manager and manually selecting 6600GT from the list. Seems to be working fine.

Performance under Win98 is much better with this card. For comparison, the Nvidia 6600GT gets 544.7 FPS in Quake 3, compared to 344.5 FPS of the X800GTO. And more importantly, there is far less difference when comparing Win98 to WinXP results with this card. The downside is that Nvidia's 81.98 drivers have poor compatibility with older Win9x games.

I did some more testing with the 6600GT and it seems that the performance loss under Win9x affects that card as well, albeit a bit differently than the X800GTO. Also, I was able to force install 77.72 drivers under Win98, which seem to be slightly more compatible than 81.98. Some benchmarks:

Win98SE - Nvidia GeForce 6600GT PCIe (77.72 drivers)

• Quake2 640x480 software - 246.2
• Quake2 1024x768x32 OpenGL - 550.1
• Quake3 1024x768x32 OpenGL - 548.1 FPS
• Drakan 1024x768x32 Direct3D - 194.5
• 3DMark 2001SE - 14623

WinXP - Nvidia GeForce 6600GT PCIe (77.77 drivers)

• Quake2 640x480 software - 240.2
• Quake2 1024x768x32 OpenGL - 575.6
• Quake3 1024x768x32 OpenGL - 571.8
• Drakan 1024x768x32 Direct3D - 275.5
• 3DMark 2001SE - 26801

It looks like OpenGL performance doesn't differ as much on the 6600GT, but Direct3D scores do vary quite a bit between Win98 and WinXP. And while 77.72 drivers seem to be slightly more compatible, they still aren't a good fit for many Win9x games. For example, Unreal Tournament ran at a snail's pace on the Nvidia 6600GT with those drivers installed. In comparison, the Radeon X800GTO was able to properly run every game I threw at it using Catalyst 6.2 under Win98.

I have a very similar build myself and the X800 series is unbeatable for this purpose. I went with a VIA chipset with proper DMA and a high end Yamaha XG sound card for better DOS compatibility as I wanted it to be a proper AIO machine though.

appiah4 wrote on 2023-09-07, 09:12:

I have a very similar build myself and the X800 series is unbeatable for this purpose.

Awesome build! And yeah, the X800 cards have an incredible amount of power for that era, especially if you want to play Win9x games at 1600x1200 with AA and AF cranked up. Pretty amazing piece of tech, which still works on Win9x.

I went with a VIA chipset with proper DMA and a high end Yamaha XG sound card for better DOS compatibility as I wanted it to be a proper AIO machine though.

Nice! For my part, I was able to install SB16 emulation on the Audigy 2 ZS and it worked fine from within the Win98 DOS prompt. I didn't do any detailed testing since DOS gaming is not a high priority for this system, but it's nice that it does work. Might be fun to replay the original Quake using software rendering at a higher resolution. I will check that out when I get the slightly more powerful E8600 CPU which I ordered yesterday.

A year or two ago in russian forum ru-board.com was a discussion about performance issues of PCI-E video cards in Windows 9x, mostly affected GeForce 6 and 7 series. As far as I know there is no solution yet.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-09-07, 08:58:

I did some more testing with the 6600GT and it seems that the performance loss under Win9x affects that card as well, albeit a b […]
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I did some more testing with the 6600GT and it seems that the performance loss under Win9x affects that card as well, albeit a bit differently than the X800GTO. Also, I was able to force install 77.72 drivers under Win98, which seem to be slightly more compatible than 81.98. Some benchmarks:

Win98SE - Nvidia GeForce 6600GT PCIe (77.72 drivers)

• Quake2 640x480 software - 246.2
• Quake2 1024x768x32 OpenGL - 550.1
• Quake3 1024x768x32 OpenGL - 548.1 FPS
• Drakan 1024x768x32 Direct3D - 194.5
• 3DMark 2001SE - 14623

WinXP - Nvidia GeForce 6600GT PCIe (77.77 drivers)

• Quake2 640x480 software - 240.2
• Quake2 1024x768x32 OpenGL - 575.6
• Quake3 1024x768x32 OpenGL - 571.8
• Drakan 1024x768x32 Direct3D - 275.5
• 3DMark 2001SE - 26801

It looks like OpenGL performance doesn't differ as much on the 6600GT, but Direct3D scores do vary quite a bit between Win98 and WinXP. And while 77.72 drivers seem to be slightly more compatible, they still aren't a good fit for many Win9x games. For example, Unreal Tournament ran at a snail's pace on the Nvidia 6600GT with those drivers installed. In comparison, the Radeon X800GTO was able to properly run every game I threw at it using Catalyst 6.2 under Win98.

Strange, on my much weaker machine I don't see that difference between W98SE and WXP in 3DM01. I'll try some more X700s and some games this weekend, but it seems the AMD chipset doesn't suffer from such power fluctuations. Could it be related to a multi-core CPU?

Your benchmark scores are quite low, indeed.
Off the top of my head, even though I don't recall exact numbers, I seem to remember having a similar performance issue when I ran the benchmarks on Win98 with 4GB RAM in dual channel. This is the reason why I reverted to using a single 2GB DIMM. Not sure if it's the same problem in your case (on your specific motherboard), but it's definitely worth a try.

These are the results I got with a Pentium Dual Core E5800 @ 3.7 GHz and a Radeon X800XT on a Win98SE PC (driver version 6.2):

bloodem wrote on 2023-09-08, 10:13:

Your benchmark scores are quite low, indeed.
Off the top of my head, even though I don't recall exact numbers, I seem to remember having a similar performance issue when I ran the benchmarks on Win98 with 4GB RAM in dual channel. This is the reason why I reverted to using a single 2GB DIMM. Not sure if it's the same problem in your case (on your specific motherboard), but it's definitely worth a try.

You're the man! 😀

That was indeed the cause of the issue. Removing the second 2 GB RAM stick brought Win9x performance much closer to that of WinXP. I've only tested Quake 2 and 3 so far, but it was enough to see the difference. I'll post more detailed benchmarks a bit later. Also, my E8600 CPU has arrived, and it should improve the scores even more.

EDIT - updates benchmarks:

Win98SE - ATi Radeon X800GTO PCIe (Catalyst 6.2)

• Quake2 640x480 software - 317.8
• Quake2 1024x768x32 OpenGL - 807.7
• Quake3 1024x768x32 OpenGL - 553.4
• Drakan 1024x768x32 Direct3D - 435.1
• 3DMark 2001SE - 32875

Now that's more like it! The scores are still lower than those posted by bloodem, but I think that's likely due to his higher clocked CPU and X800XL card. I'm very happy with these results, and now I can finally take this build off of the test bench and put it in a proper case.

Here's my Win98 installation procedure for this board, in case it might help someone else:

1. In the BIOS, set SATA to IDE Compatible mode (I'm using SATA SSDs) and disable all on-board devices including HDA, LAN, Serial and Parallel ports
2. In the BIOS, set the total number of USB ports to 6 (default is 12) because they take up valuable IRQs
3. Boot from a floppy disk and start the Win98SE installation normally
4. After the first stage of the installation completes and the system restarts, press F8 and choose "Safe Mode Command Prompt Only"
5. At the command prompt, type WININIT and wait until the process completes
6. Apply R. Loew's PATCHMEM
7. Apply R. Loew's PTCHSATA and copy SATA.INF to C:\WINDOWS\INF
8. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart and let the Windows installation process complete normally
9. After the Windows installation is finished, install unofficial Win98 ICH9 drivers from here
10. Open Device Manager and enable DMA for your hard drive and CD-ROM
11. Install NUSB 3.3, reboot, and then manually update the "PCI Universal Serial Bus" device for USB 2.0 support
12. Install DirectX 9.0c
13. Under Device Manager, remove the "Standard Display Adapter (VGA)" then reboot
14. Install Catalyst 6.2 normally
15. Install Audigy2 ZS drivers as per my guide

After all that, I get a fully functionaly Win98SE system with working SB16 emulation for DOS games (from within the Win98 DOS prompt). No unknown hardware in Device Manager and no entries with exclamation marks.

Now that the E8600 is here, I tried Quake 1 in software mode and got 346.7 FPS at 640x480. 😁 Note that this was from within the Win9x DOS prompt. However, any higher VESA resolutions seemed to be buggy in that environment, resulting in severe graphical distortions.

I then dropped down to pure DOS and the higher VESA resolutions did work fine there. But for some reason, it seemed like V-Sync was permanently turned on, despite my settings in the config file. Nonetheless, I tried a timedemo at 1280x1024 and got a locked 60 FPS with FASTVID enabled. This might be of interest to those who prefer the original software rendering look of Quake.

You need to specifically disable Vsync in the console. ATi will always enable Vsync on all VESA modes by default.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-09-08, 13:14:

That was indeed the cause of the issue. Removing the second 2 GB RAM stick brought Win9x performance much closer to that of WinXP. I've only tested Quake 2 and 3 so far, but it was enough to see the difference. I'll post more detailed benchmarks a bit later. Also, my E8600 CPU has arrived, and it should improve the scores even more.

Glad to hear that it's working for you! 😀
If you have time, maybe you can also test Incoming. I remember seeing major performance issues with this game (it runs at 1 - 2 FPS at most) in Win98 with Radeon 9x00 / X8xx cards when using the Catalyst 6.2 driver. I haven't dug deeper, though, hopefully there's a workaround.

In case you or anybody else will find it useful, I also have benchmark scores with a Core2 Duo E8600 OC @ 4GHz and Radeon X850XT PCIe (520MHz core / 1080MHz memory):

One thing I found funny is that, in GLQuake, at 640 x 480, the Radeon X850XT is "bottlenecking" the E8600 🤣.
When running GLQuake with the "-window" argument, you can test lower resolutions like 320 x 240 (in window mode) and you will see more than 2000 FPS.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-09-08, 18:11:

You need to specifically disable Vsync in the console. ATi will always enable Vsync on all VESA modes by default.

Thanks! You're absolutely correct. By setting vid_wait 0 after starting the game (and also after any resolution change), I was able to disable V-Sync and benchmark properly under pure DOS. Here are the results with the E8600 and X800GTO at stock clocks and FASTVID enabled:

• Quake 640x480 (software) - 365.2
• Quake 800x600 (software) - 300.3
• Quake 1024x768 (software) - 216.9
• Quake 1280x1024 (software) - 141.1

I can't try 1600x1200 on this monitor so that will have to wait until I switch to my other one. Still, pretty amazing that the game is playable at such high resolutions using software rendering.

bloodem wrote on 2023-09-08, 18:11:

Glad to hear that it's working for you! 😀
If you have time, maybe you can also test Incoming. I remember seeing major performance issues with this game (it runs at 1 - 2 FPS at most) in Win98 with Radeon 9x00 / X8xx cards when using the Catalyst 6.2 driver. I haven't dug deeper, though, hopefully there's a workaround.

Sure, I'll give it a try after finally putting all the components into a case and hooking everything up to my main monitor. Might take a day or two since I have some other stuff to work on as well.

In case you or anybody else will find it useful, I also have benchmark scores with a Core2 Duo E8600 OC @ 4GHz and Radeon X850XT PCIe (520MHz core / 1080MHz memory):

Awesome! It's really incredible how far one can push Win9x games with this type of hardware.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-09-08, 14:54:

Here's my Win98 installation procedure for this board, in case it might help someone else:

1. Apply HimemX and R. Loew's SATA patch then restart

Wow, very nice build! I have a similar build with a Gigabyte G31 board and a Wolfdale at 3Ghz... Can you please run Quake3 1.32C DEMO001 (1024x768 -- everything on max -- you will need to look for the DM_68 version for later Quake3 releases)? I think I got in the low or mid 500s.

Also, what is the purpose of applying HimemX in your procedure?

Thanks

mockingbird wrote on 2023-09-08, 20:55:

Wow, very nice build! I have a similar build with a Gigabyte G31 board and a Wolfdale at 3Ghz... Can you please run Quake3 1.32C DEMO001 (1024x768 -- everything on max -- you will need to look for the DM_68 version for later Quake3 releases)? I think I got in the low or mid 500s.

Under Win98SE with Catalyst 6.2 I'm getting 475.1 FPS with these settings using demo FOUR. Also, under WinXP using Catalyst 7.11 I get 569.4 FPS using the same settings and demo. The CPU and GPU are both at stock clocks, and all driver settings are at default, except for V-Sync which is turned off.

I'm not sure how to play DEMO001. Is it available in the game or do I need to download it separately from somewhere? I don't see it in the demos menu.

Also, what is the purpose of applying HimemX in your procedure?

Win98SE will crash during the second part of the installation if you have more than 1 GB RAM. This is where HimemX comes into the picture and limits available RAM to 512 MB. Later on, after installing R. Loew's PATCHMEM, you can remove HimemX unless you need it for something else.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-09-08, 22:00:

Win98SE will crash during the second part of the installation if you have more than 1 GB RAM.

This is one of those hugely amusing Win98 SE bugs. There was another amusing bug (which got fixed), I forget if it was in Win98, Win98 SE or Win95 where it would crash after... 49.7 days of uptime.

Both of those bugs, I tend to find amusing, because no one in the real world of the second half of the 1990s would have encountered them. Anyone who manages to keep a Win98 SE machine up for 49.7 days of actually doing something with it... deserves a medal. And, well, anyone running Win98 SE and trying to do real things with it with more than, oh, 128-256 megs of RAM is an idiot who will run out of system resources less than half-way before maxing out that RAM. (I presume this is why the RAM one wasn't fixed by Microsoft - no reasonable person tried to run that much RAM on 98 SE while Microsoft was still supporting it?)

But... of course... on retro systems over decades later... it's almost easier to have 'too much' RAM rather than the right amount. Certainly once you get into DDR2 - I don't think I have ever seen a desktop DDR2 DIMM under 512 megs, though such a thing could exist (Google is inconclusive - seems to turn up mostly SODIMMs for printers). I've seen DDR2 laptop SODIMMs at 256 megs. I... guess... DDR1 at 128 megs must have existed since I have a vague recollection of my uncle getting a Dell DDR1 system with 128 megs of RAM (and adding 256 more 20 minutes after it was unboxed). But either way, and even if you're under the 1 gig bug, you're at way higher than a reasonable 64-128 megs for Win98 SE.

Also, I would note, it's funny how much trauma some of us have from trying to use Win98 SE for productivity tasks. I'm sure no one playing games ever ran out of system resources within 30-60 minutes of booting, but if you had an always-on cable/DSL Internet connection and you wanted to keep a web browser, two IM clients, an email client, etc running, well, that was the reality back in the day. I have not used Win98 for, really, anything (haven't built a Win98 retro system... yet...) since Christmas week 2000, 23 years ago, and yet that trauma of low system resources is absolutely fresh in my mind. And conversely, I remember the absolute breath of fresh air that switching to Win2000 brought... one of those absolutely insane leaps forward in computing that is hard to explain to someone who never used a computer in the second half of the 1990s.