I've got two hard drives, the master is a 100 GB with an NTFS format upon which Windows XP is installed and the secondary hard drive is just 20 GB but FAT32 formatted and Windows 98 installed. I've read in some places that Windows 98 and FAT32 is better for games so I installed the same game (Madden 2003) on each hard drive with the different operating systems. I also made sure that the proper driver for the video card was installed depending on which OS I was in. So running the game and using a frame per second application (FRAPS) I observed as much as a 10 fps difference during game play running it on Windows 98 visa-a-vis Windows XP. Windows XP ran the game with higher frame rates. Now I made sure that both operating systems were fully-patched and that SP-1 was installed for XP. The only thing I can think of is that the driver development team for the video card (ATI) put more time into optimizing the drivers for XP than in Windows 98. But other than that, unless the game itself prefers Windows XP for better frame rates, I can't think of any other way to try to equalize the performance of the game in both operating systems. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks. If it helps, I have an ATI Radeon 8500LE with the latest and greatest Catalyst 2.3 drivers.

Since it is 2003 it may very well be optimized for XP, is all I can think.

Well if madden game is new (Which im guessing it is) then i think natuarally XP would support and run the game better and at a higher speed, answer your Q? Good Luck