32bit vs 64bit Vista performance comparison?

[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-comput...4-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.

[f0dder]

Not just a load of 64-bit apps - but apps that actually take advantage of 64-bit and has a performance gain

[Ralf Maximus]

Ah.  So you don't my 64-bit version of "Hello world" then?

[Carol Haynes]

I read somewhere a while back (can't remember where) that some benchmarking actually found 64-bit XP slower than 32-bit. The main advantage seems to be unlocking the memory limit.

Can someone answer a simple question though - if I upgrade to XP64 do I have to also upgrade all of my software to 64-bit versions or will 32 bit versions install and play happily on a 64-bit OS ? If there are software compatability issues is there a good site with a list of issues and workarounds for software that has never been released in 64-bit format?

Presumably if I installed XP64 I could install VMWare or similar and run XP32 in a virtual machine?

[f0dder]

Carol: some 32-bit software might break, but I haven't seen that myself. My guess is that it'd mainly be things that's very dirty, and would have already broken on 32bit XP on a 64bit CPU running on PAE mode with DEP turned on. Also, 16bit support is completely removed, this affects some old installers (yeah, 16bit installers for 32bit apps - wonderful).

I haven't been running 64bit for very long, but so far everything works just fine. While you generally don't need to upgrade 32bit apps (only sensible reason to do so is for apps that can take advantage of it), you will need 64bit drivers for all your hardware, and that can be a trouble for some peripherals.

You can run xp32 in a vm just fine (and surprisingly enough, you can even run xp64 in vmware on a xp32!), but it wouldn't make that much sense, unless you need 16bit stuff... since obviously vmware doesn't help much wrt. driver peripherals.

As for 64bit xp being slower, dunno... could have been when drivers where immature. Code size does increase a bit, but not as badly as it could have, thanks the the instruction format (RIP-relative addressing rather than fixed 64bit offsets, for instance), but that is still pretty little, and data files (which is the size hog) don't magically grow

[Carol Haynes]

Thanks - that is useful info. If you decide to go the 64-bit XP route do you need a new installation key for XP or can you change base without having to buy the product again?

[f0dder]

Thanks - that is useful info. If you decide to go the 64-bit XP route do you need a new installation key for XP or can you change base without having to buy the product again?

-Carol Haynes (November 25, 2007, 06:13 AM)

That's a good question - I honestly don't know whether 32- and 64-bit XP versions differentiate between keys. Iirc the 32- and 64-bit versions were priced differently, so I wouldn't be surprised.

[insert_nick]

If this can be any useful, here's a post by Aaron Giles with some benchmarks for MAME compilation on his new system with Vista 64-bit... but the comparison is with a different machine, so probably it's not so interesting here.

[PPLandry]

Carol: some 32-bit software might break, but I haven't seen that myself.

-f0dder (November 24, 2007, 07:11 PM)

FYI, On the Ecco Pro Yahoo group, users have reported that Ecco Pro 4.01 (latest version, a 32 bit app) does not run on Vista 64

[f0dder]

Carol: some 32-bit software might break, but I haven't seen that myself.

-f0dder (November 24, 2007, 07:11 PM)

FYI, On the Ecco Pro Yahoo group, users have reported that Ecco Pro 4.01 (latest version, a 32 bit app) does not run on Vista 64

-PPLandry (December 14, 2007, 11:49 AM)

What about Vista32, and XP64?

64bit OS is one possible problem, Vista is a lot of possible problems