1 Aug
2024
1 Aug
'24
4:11 p.m.
On Thu, 1 Aug 2024 at 13:23, cz via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Windows NT and 2000 did not have the "cut through" ability for apps to
talk to video without going through security proxies, thus games were
always terrible on them.
Windows XP was the first OS (well aside from Windows 95/ME/whatever)
that allowed fast access. This made it a security sinkhole, but everyone
loved it and that's why it was adopted as the standard for so long.
I'm not specifically agreeing or disagreeing here, but I did read back
at the time that something like what you describe applied to NT4,
although I do not remember details. I think you could install DirectX
but it didn't actually connect to the graphics card: it always did
software rendering and performance was poor. Only actual OpenGL was
hardware-accelerated, as it had been on NT 3.x as well.
I'm not a gamer and wasn't then, and I never investigated it much at
the time. On the magazine I wrote for then, Windows 98 was known as
dismissively as "GameOS" and nobody seriously wanted to play games on
NT4.
I thought, but am not sure, that Win2K fixed this.
The main visible "improvements" in XP were themes, faster
boot/shutdown, compression of memory images so that hibernation and
resume were much quicker, and some bundled tools (Movie Maker, File
and Settings Transfer Wizard, etc.)
The real change was external, in the PC hardware market and ecosystem:
by the time XP shipped, most hardware vendors offered NT drivers for
their hardware, firmware was more NT-compatible, games had been
cleaned of code that hit the metal and worked via legal Windows APIs,
and so on.
So a new PC in 2002 worked much better with XP than a late-1990s PC
did, and games worked on XP, etc... but that wasn't due to any
particular change in the OS, it was that the hardware and software
market had caught up and stopped making unsafe DOS calls, shipping
direct-hardware-bashing VxD drivers, etc.
MS knew this but spun it as "XP merges Windows 98 and 2000 to give you
the best of both worlds, rich media and gaming with NT stability" --
but in actual fact no convergence had happened.
--
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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