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32bit vs 64bit Vista performance comparison?

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Josh:
Does anyone know what the performance benefit would be for someone wanting to swap from 32bit vista to 64 bit vista? I am contemplating it. I have full drivers for all of my hardware, so that isnt an issue. I just want to see if the performance is justifiable to do a full format and reinstall again. PLEASE NO "Forget vista, go to XP" comments. That is not the purpose of this thread.

Ralf Maximus:
If you believe these guys, it's maybe 11% faster.

http://64-bit-computers.com/windows-vista-32-bit-vs-64-bit-benchmark.html

Josh:
Good find. I will look more at this site. Thanks!

f0dder:
In general I wouldn't expect too much from going 64bit unless you have apps that can specifically take advantage of it - at least for XP, situation might be different with Vista. There's a number of improvements though, like calling convention is mostly register based, with much less need to spill to stack, and context switching iirc. has been made more efficient as well (even though more data has to be saved per thread).

The benchmark on the site posted by Ralf doesn't tell that much - was the benchmarking software 64-bit, or just the OS? (I'd guess at least some of it is 64bit, judging by the large speed increase for dot product calculation).

All in all I wouldn't say a reinstall is justified if you have <= 2gig ram and don't have any specific 64bit software you know will benefit from it. But once your current install gets clodded up (or you're just bored and feeling adventurous), sure, go for 64bit!

On my system, I do find that loading in games feel a bit smoother, but that's probably just placebo... but on the other hand, if an app spends a lot of time "in the operating system" (whether that be usermode parts like kernel32 (which is still called kernel32 on win64 even though it's not 32bit code) or drivers) can benefit from a 64bit OS even though the app is still 32bit. Dunno how much this is visible on x86, but it was very visible on the 64bit Alpha when running 32bit x86 apps under emulation :)

Ralf Maximus:
What f0dder said.  And I would also add that even if the "geekmark" is accurate, and you really do get a 10-11% improvement, does that justify the headache of rebuilding your system?

In automotive terms you need at least 10% more horsepower to even *notice* an improvement, much less gain any benefit.

On the other hand, 10% might offset the cost of running a background virus scanner.  So if you're planning to burn it down anyway, maybe it *is* worth it.  Unless as f0dder says, you've got a load of 64-bit apps laying around, flip a coin at this point.

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