From 32 To 64 Bit - Does It Matter?

[miniajuer]

Hi All

It's getting time to change my Hard Drives for something bigger and I was also thinking I would upgrade the O.S to Win7.

My question is do I jump to 64 bit,or stick with 32.

I must admit I use my computer for music writing,and I use Sonar X1 which is a 32/64bit DAW.

Regarding games,does it make any difference which OS I use?

Thanks

 

[gorcorps]

Yes. With a 32 bit OS it can only utilize up to ~4gigs of ram. You really need 8 these days, and you have to use a 64 bit OS to do it.

 

[shortylickens]

Yes. With a 32 bit OS it can only utilize up to ~4gigs of ram. You really need 8 these days, and you have to use a 64 bit OS to do it.

The reason you need 8 gigs is because the 64 bit OS's we have are horridly inefficient. All my games run just fine on XP with 3.25 GB of available memory.

 

[motsm]

The reason you need 8 gigs is because the 64 bit OS's we have are horridly inefficient.

Not even remotely true. Windows 7 uses more of your memory so the OS will be quicker to respond by using various caches. As soon as a program needs that memory however, it frees it up by progressively dumping unneeded cache. I've personally seen this work perfectly using x64 REAPER and loading in gigabytes of samples; watching Task Manager will show Windows memory use plummet as REAPERs needs grow.

:Edit: The only thing I'd look into in your situation is if Sonar X1 has a decent 32bit bridge, as it will be required to run your 32bit VST's.

 

[imaheadcase]

No reason to got 32 bit anymore for OS.

 

[pontifex]

I use vista 64 with 4 gb of memory and all my games run fine.

 

[apoppin]

The reason you need 8 gigs is because the 64 bit OS's we have are horridly inefficient. All my games run just fine on XP with 3.25 GB of available memory.

PC games generally will run better on Win 7 than on XP - and they do not need more RAM than what a 32-bit OS addresses. Although 32-bit is fine for PC gaming, a handful of games are specifically written to take advantage of 64-bit.

EDITED - Besides not being necessary for gaming, tere is no reason not to upgrade to Win 7 64-bit unless you have old hardware. And 64-bit Win 7 offers many tangible benefits over the 32-bit version.

 

[Demo24]

I use vista 64 with 4 gb of memory and all my games run fine.

Same for me. On some games that need more memory I notice some serious frame rate issues if I have some stuff open in the background (like firefox and all the plugin extensions), but closing it fixes that.

 

[Scotteq]

The reason you need 8 gigs is because the 64 bit OS's we have are horridly inefficient. All my games run just fine on XP with 3.25 GB of available memory.

Not true at all: While there is a little bit of jiggery pokery having to do with the need to keep 32 bit and 64 bit communication/code paths separate, your Applications' Binaries run natively and untouched.

 

[Texashiker]

From 32 To 64 Bit - Does It Matter?

32 bit operating ssytems are dying out, just like 16 bit OSs did years ago.

With programs getting larger and larger, your going to hit a limit on how well they run.

Could you imagine running a modern game on windows 95? The last time I looked, left 4 dead 2 took up 1.2 gigs of memory, Have fun doing that with windows 95.

Thats the same thing your going to be running into in the near future. Just as windows 3.11, windows 95 and windows 98 fell to the wayside, so are all 32 bit operating systems.

64 bit is the way to go, there is no reason to even consider a 32 bit OS these days.

 

[mmntech]

If you have a 64-bit CPU, there's no reason not to use a 64-bit OS. XP is considerably outdated.

 

[apoppin]

32 bit operating ssytems are dying out, just like 16 bit OSs did years ago.

It's going to take a long (long) long time for 32-bit to die out. Many many years. PC games are still 99.9% written for 32-bit. And think of the business world and corporations that gets by fine with old HW and 32-bit OSes.
--MS Office *finally* is 64-bit. And it is only for Excel and the power users that need to address more than 2GB of data at once.

If you have a 64-bit CPU, there's no reason not to use a 64-bit OS.

Older HW is one reason. Vista or Win 7 32-bit are very capable OSes and have significant advantages over XP. They also work pretty well on older notebook PCs.

The only disadvantage to 32-bit is that the OS addresses a bit less than 4GB of system RAM. Not many programs are written to take advantage of more RAM than that; not yet, anyway.

 

[Canbacon]

--MS Office *finally* is 64-bit. And it is only for Excel and the power users that need to address more than 2GB of data at once.

MS 2010 64bit is a godsend to me at work. Excel docs with very large data tables, macros, and all that jazz is widely used where I am. *shudder*

On topic, there is no reason to stick with 32bit unless you have some 16bit applications and maybe some 32bit drivers and applications. As more games are coded for 64bit we will see more gains. I believe (from some old tech briefs) that BF3 has been developed for 64bit with DX11 as the main graphics codepath.

 

[Texashiker]

Something that has not been mentioned: 64 bis OSs do not support 16 bit installers.

If your running an old program (1990s style program), it probably will not install on a 64 bit OS.

Here at work we are using an OLD medical records program designed for NT4, it will not install on server 2008 R2. The error message is the 64 bit OS does not support 16 bit installers.

Some older games will install but will not run properly on 64 bit OSs - Quake 3, Quake 2 and Diablo for example. I had to find a fix to play Quake 3 and Quake 2 on windows 7 64 bit, and Diablo just looks terrible.

 

[Arkaign]

Yes. With a 32 bit OS it can only utilize up to ~4gigs of ram. You really need 8 these days, and you have to use a 64 bit OS to do it.

While I agree that for a new build, 8GB is a good thing to get at the current prices/deals, I haven't seen any games *yet* that run any better with 8GB vs. 4GB. I suppose it's possible if someone was trying to run a game with a crapton of other apps still cranking away in the background, but that's counterintuitive to me.

 

[Zenoth]

Back around four or five years ago it'd be debatable but today going for a 32-Bit OS especially like Windows 7 (or even with Vista) makes no sense in my book, 64-Bit is good now and it's been so for years.

 

[AstroManLuca]

Go with 64-bit, no reason at all to limit yourself to 32-bit unless there's a specific piece of hardware that requires a 32-bit OS and can't be replaced cheaply.

 

[Ross Ridge]

With 3G or less of RAM go with 32-bit. With more than 4G go with 64-bit.

If you got 4G then you can go either way. Either go with 32-bit for backwards compatibility with hardware and software, or 64-bit so you can use 0.75G or so of RAM you'll otherwise lose.

 

[Markbnj]

Yes. With a 32 bit OS it can only utilize up to ~4gigs of ram. You really need 8 these days, and you have to use a 64 bit OS to do it.

I have eight GB on my system, Win7/64, and the only way more than 40% of it gets used is if I run a couple of VMs.

Most of the software people run is written for a 32-bit platform, so it runs in WoW64 on 64-bit systems. Individual 32-bit processes are still limited to a 32-bit address space.

 

[Chiropteran]

Isn't the "lost" ram on a 32 bit OS dependent on how much address space your other hardware requires? If you have a 2GB graphics card, you would be limited to less than 2GB on XP. Seems like that would hurt. Next gen cards will probably have 2GB. Using XP or an other 32 bit OS on a new system today seems foolish, unless you don't care about future upgrades.

 

[skace]

8GB isn't a requirement, however 32bit is a short sighted dead-end.

 

[Ross Ridge]

Isn't the "lost" ram on a 32 bit OS dependent on how much address space your other hardware requires? If you have a 2GB graphics card, you would be limited to less than 2GB on XP.

Graphics card don't map their entire memory into PCI space. My 1G video card only maps 256M, and I think that's typical. BIOSes can make that worse by address rounding and allocated more space than the card actually needs.

With a single PCI-Express card the amount of memory lost typically ends up being 0.5G or 0.75G.

 

[imaheadcase]

Something that has not been mentioned: 64 bis OSs do not support 16 bit installers.

If your running an old program (1990s style program), it probably will not install on a 64 bit OS.

Here at work we are using an OLD medical records program designed for NT4, it will not install on server 2008 R2. The error message is the 64 bit OS does not support 16 bit installers.

Some older games will install but will not run properly on 64 bit OSs - Quake 3, Quake 2 and Diablo for example. I had to find a fix to play Quake 3 and Quake 2 on windows 7 64 bit, and Diablo just looks terrible.

Plenty of 3rd party apps to fix those games you mentioned. The reason diablo looks terrible is because you are playing at a higher rez than what you originally played it at.

 

[Aikouka]

I honestly see no reason not to go with 64-bit Windows. The state of drivers was pretty bad back in XP 64-bit days, but it's been fine since about a year after Vista came out.

The only difficulty that you may have is that 64-bit versions of Windows have a fun little thing in them that enforces signed drivers. This isn't an issue for the most part, but if you ever want to use a community-developed driver, chances are you'll have to jump through a few hoops to get past it.

I've never run into it though and I've been using 64-bit Windows since Vista came out.

8GB isn't a requirement, however 32bit is a short sighted dead-end.

I think 8GB is more or less fairly common because of how ridiculously cheap RAM is.

 

[jordanecmusic]

I use vista 64 with 4 gb of memory and all my games run fine.

I use windows 7 64 with 2 gb of memory and all my games run fine. In fact, the jump from 7 32bit to 7 64 bit made my games run better and smoother.