Running Games without Windows clutter

D

Dario D.

Gawd
Joined
Dec 8, 2004
Messages
582
I was just wondering if it's possible to run games on Windows without... well, anything else running. ...and I mean NOTHING.

When I see Oblivion being played on Xbox, and how fast it runs on high settings, it makes me wonder why 2x better hardware on my PC can't run it anywhere near as well.

Is there some way to simply annihilate everything except absolutely crucial drivers, and run games with nothing else going on whatsoever? I mean even killing things like explorer.exe...

I was just about to launch Oblivion after forcing closed Explorer.exe (knowing that I could reopen it with task manager at any time), but, of course, it won't stay closed, and will re-open itself.

There's GOT to be some way to get a PC to act like a console, and load proper drivers without loading all of Windows, right?

Is there some kind of makeshift OS that lets you boot straight into a game, and load the needed drivers, without the OS?

Please, without getting into technicalities about how PCs are not consoles - you know what I mean.
 
If you take everything but the drivers out of the operating system, then each and every game would have to reimplement what you took out of the operating system. Besides, when you are playing a game, your operating system shouldn't significantly hurt your performance(assuming you don't have something else running at the same time that would hurt your performance).

If a game needs more memory, then the operating system will page out other processes to disk. Unless other processes are active when you are gaming, then they won't be taking up much cpu time.

This would also put a substantial burden on the gamemakers. If you take stuff out of the operating system, then that's more that the gamemakers have to code. Why make them all reimplement the same stuff when you can just put it in the operating system? You're going to need things like audio and graphics libraries for just about every game. And those libraries are going to depend on other libraries. Sure, you could take a few things out of windows, but not much, and I don't think it would affect performance very significantly.
 
Your xbox also is designed from the ground up to run games and only games. Your xbox isn't designed to run MS Excel, or Outlook, or Firefox, or Acrobat Reader. It doesn't need to know what printers are, or what scanners are, or what a SCSI card is.

There's no compatibility or legacy problems with an xbox. An xbox has one video chipset, one sound chipset, one motherboard, one cpu. Games are made knowing that an xbox has a certain speed CPU and a certain amount of video and main memory to play in. Since everything about every person's xbox is known, games are made to that spec.

If every PC had the same CPU and same memory and same videocard, I'm sure games on PC's would be faster too. You'd just never be able to replace a part with a better one.
 
SuperSubZero said:
There's no compatibility or legacy problems with an xbox. An xbox has one video chipset, one sound chipset, one motherboard, one cpu. Games are made knowing that an xbox has a certain speed CPU and a certain amount of video and main memory to play in. Since everything about every person's xbox is known, games are made to that spec.
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Right you are! If I remember correctly, that also allows for some crazy, ass backwords, optimizations to be made in some games to make them perform better.

I mean seriously, the XBOX has the equivalant of a GeForce 3 in it and they have it running Doom 3.
 
Do you really think the Xbox is pushing out the detail and resolution that your computer is?
 
djnes said:
Do you really think the Xbox is pushing out the detail and resolution that your computer is?
Click to expand...

Exactly. Let's rephrase the question: "Why does my Xbox at 720x480 run faster than my PC at 1280x1024/1600x1200/whatever?" Pretty darned obvious. Without looking into it, there are probably other graphics and physics things the Xbox isn't doing. Equivalent games look far better on my P4-3.2GHz system.

Also, games can be optimized better for the Xbox because they're all the same. A stripped-down OS will not solve that problem - your specific hardware setup will still be relatively uncommon.

I'll add my voice to the chorus: unless you're short on memory, the OS is NOT slowing your game down. If you could strip out everything, you might get 1% better performance in your game. OK, I made that number up, but it's what I would expect. I sit here with a copy of XP that was originally installed in Oct 2001, has been reinstalled over itself every time I've replaced the motherboard, boots kinda slow, but frankly, runs games as fast as I would expect.
 
I'm not sure if its due to better SMP or just a more efficient setup, but I get atleast 10% better performance on windows 2003 server compared to XP playing video games.... (I hacked out all of the un necisary services and had to hack in directX and stuff...)

anyone remember back in the day, with windows 98 you could set anything you wanted for the shell?
 
nhusby said:
anyone remember back in the day, with windows 98 you could set anything you wanted for the shell?
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You can still do that in Windows 200, XP, server 2003, etc. They just changed it from an INI setting to a registry key.
 
I havnt felt compelled to do it... but nice to know... I always used MS-Config to do it...
 
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