Win2K Performance Overall

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Hey there,

Recently I have been into 3D design and alot of people are poking me to upgrade from win98se to Win2k, I use photoshop alot and now 3D Software such as 3D studio max. My current system is a PIII 500, 256 meg 133hz sdram and of course a G400 MAX DH ..

From what I have heard you do take a performance hit
when running win2k, and was wondering what would you guys/gals recommend for decent performance running games
and mid-high performance for development software running with/without DuelHead™.

also, upgrading to a 1.4 AMD athlon
(or the up coming palomino 1.53hz) and 512 of ddr ram while retaining my g400 max.. would that be adequate hardware for win2k ? running development software as well as games like fallout 2, Arcanum, Unreal Tournament.

thanks in advance..

p.s i have an old Diamond mx300 soundcard, does anyone here have one of these and can get it to work in win2k without to much hassle (i dont need A3D that much anymore so if it can work without it id be happy).

[omegaRED]

IMO, you dont take a big hit in performance on Win2K. And surely with a 1+ GHz CPU the speed bottleneck wont be the CPU, but the G400 itself. A 1.4GHz Athlon will do nicely for 3D ...

On a side note, i`ve been using 3DSMAX4 (now 4.2) for a while, and there IS a problem with the OpenGL. With some ICDs (5.33), MAX will crash on loading of some scenes, 5.52 fixes that (but theres no bill. filtering), and the 6.51 ICD from the Win9x drivers works _almost_ perfect. Almost means that after some time (10-15mins) one of the viewports will get corrupted (it looks like the WHOLE Viewport is zoomed, including the Viewport name, grid lines, mouse pointer, transform gizmo etc.) which slows down MAX to a crawl when all 4 viewports are open. When that viewport is maximized, there isnt a problem, you can work normally. But, as soon as you open multiple VPs, there it is ... plus there is a chance of multiple VPs get corrupted, and the only solution is to restart MAX.

[xeosdd]

G400 & MX300

I know this post is old, but I though I'd reply anyway...

I've been using my system (see below) for quite some time now, without any crashes at all for a good few weeks (I had some driver/software issues about a month ago). I've been doing all kinds of stuff with my system, mainly to do with 3D software evaluation for work.

I'm afraid the bad news is that you won't see the kind of performance you're looking for. If you want kick-@$$ performace, you'll definately want to disable "True" DualHead (seperate resolutions). But in Win2k, that's a reboot or two, and you know how slow that is . You'll also want to disable as many services as possible in the Admin Tools. And the lack of TnL and a few other really nice things make certain newer games run even slower...

As for 3D performance, I rarely every get above 20-30 fps during halflife or UT. 3D applications can get really sluggish when you start running out of RAM. I haven't noticed any major bugs, but then I'm not known for my attention to detail . But forget anything with OpenGL -- you're going to get software-mode if you use seperate resolutions!

I don't like the driver situation though. There were so many promised features in magazine articles and online which were late or failed to eventualize. I'm going back to linux soon, as I've heard they have far better feature support (and OpenGL acceleration ), features I can't really live without (being a 3D software developer and all...).

As for the MX300, I've found it to be a very disappointing card. When I bought my system, I spent 2 weeks of my holidays resolving IRQ conflicts. A3D was really cool, but I never had any games which supported it well. I moved from 98 to 2k, and was forced to use the default drivers. I haven't tried 4-channel sound yet, but I've got a feeling I'm not going to be happy. And I'm not sure, but I think my MIDI quality has gone down.... still, it's a nice card, and it's done it's job well.

I'm about to move back to Linux (linux install #34). I haven't ever stuck with it for 2 reasons: Poor development environment, and soundcard problems with 2.2 kernel (I think, anyway). I'm going to give 2.4 a crack, and see how that goes. I'm going to start contributing to kDevelop (http://www.kdevelop.org) to put in some of my favourite features from Visual C++ 6, and head up the linux port of our project (now I will be able to work from home too).

This has been a long one , and I hope it helps!

Simon Wilson,
Software Engineer,
XEOS Digital Development
xeosdd at bigpond dot net dot au

My system:

* PIII 500Mhz (Copermine) processor
* Abit 440BX Motherboard
* 192M RAM
* Matrox G400 32M DH
* DiamondMM MX300 Soundcard
* ISA NE2000-compatible NIC
* ISA SCSI card & Sony SCSI CD-R

Software:
* Windows 2000 with Service Pack 2 & all updates
* Many different 3D packages over the last year:
- Photoshop 5.0 and 6.0
- 3D Studio Max 4 and 4.2
- Maya 3 (evaluation version)
- Rhinocerous 1.1 eval
- SolidWorks 99
* A whole stack of development-related software:
- MSVC++ 6
- VB, VID and VJ++ on occasions too
* And even a few Games:
- Half Life
- Unreal Tournament
- Flight Simulator