Windows 98 vs. Windows 2000 vs. Windows XP

All of the benchmarks prior to this point were run under Windows 2000, but how does that affect ATI's performance considering their history of having much better Windows 98 drivers?

We ran most of our benchmarks under Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows XP for the three major cards in this review: ATI's Radeon 8500, NVIDIA's GeForce3 and STMicro's Kyro II.  The rest of the cards should have similar results under the various OSes.

The test settings were identical to what we used in the individual game tests before.

Windows 98SE
Windows 2000 SP2
Windows XP RC2
Serious Sam
ATI Radeon 8500
71.2
68.7
Crashed
NVIDIA GeForce3
84.7
85.3
79.4
STMicro Kyro II
41
42.1
37.8
Quake III Arena
ATI Radeon 8500
144.9
145.4
Crashed
NVIDIA GeForce3
160.7
168.3
166
STMicro Kyro II
70.3
71.6
70.6
Half-Life: Counterstrike
ATI Radeon 8500
82.3* (v-sync enabled)
156.8
156.7
NVIDIA GeForce3
157.8
180.8
179.8
STMicro Kyro II
116.8
121.7
95.0
UnrealTournament
ATI Radeon 8500
95.63
72.49* (v-sync?)
72.12 (v-sync?)
NVIDIA GeForce3
99.38
95.66
96.47
STMicro Kyro II
83.43
85.11
83.19
DroneZ
ATI Radeon 8500
79.58
94
Crashed
NVIDIA GeForce3
89.96
91.1
Crashed
STMicro Kyro II
46.2
48.86
35.84
AquaNox (AquaMark)
ATI Radeon 8500
Crashed
30.3
29.9
NVIDIA GeForce3
42.5
39.5
40.8
STMicro Kyro II
12.6
12.4
10.7
Max Payne
ATI Radeon 8500
62.32
62
62.95
NVIDIA GeForce3
72.02
71.35
71.23
STMicro Kyro II
28.57
28.8
26.2

We'd like to commend all three manufacturers: ATI, NVIDIA and STMicro for passing this test with flying colors. For the most part there was a reasonable performance parity between Windows 98, 2000 and XP RC2. There were a few outliers but we were very pleased overall with the performance offered by all three driver sets.

Max Payne & 3DMark 2001 Performance SMOOTHVISION: Finally, something good to say
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