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Living Room / Re: 32bit vs 64bit Vista performance comparison?
« Last post by f0dder on November 24, 2007, 05:52 PM »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
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
- but durrrrrn those look cool!
