@vox984
| Think back to 1995. At the time we had DOS games and windows 3.1. But of course, you couldn't multitask at all. Win3.1 was unusable as a gaming platform because drawing through the win32 GDI api was dog slow. So games were written to run in dos mode, you couldn't put the game in a window and check your email, etc. Then Win95 came out, and it supported directX so games could get at the video hardware and it supported pre-emptive multitasking which was critcical for writing a very time/timing sensitive application like a game... but there was still a huge problem. Games still ran faster in dos with less resources. DirectX and preemptive multitasking was good, but you still had windows running in the background sucking up cpu cycles and holding onto a big chunk of RAM. So it was slower, and gamers didn't see any improvement in graphics. |
DirectX was a huge success because of its universal support for all sound, video and other gaming peripherals. You folks remember the DOS days,
c:\rott>sndsetup.exe > select sound card (sound blaster prof/sound blaster 16/etc ..)> select IRQ DMA channels etc ...
Thank God for Dos/4GW otherwise we had to make boot disks for every game setting conventional ram, EMS/XMS etc...
Windows 95 slowly but steadily removed the excess baggage involved into playing games. Windows 95's interface was a lot easier to use and more accessible. Once DirectX hit version 3 and AGP Graphics cards came out with native Win95 drivers games started to look better and work faster in Windows 95.
There is no way you can compare Win XP to DOS. DOS to Win95 was a revolution. XP to Vista is an unproven mutant hybrid.
Heeeeyyyy!!!! <Snap>
