Is Vista 64bit really any faster than 32bit?

[Twista]

Just wondering before i format for no reason. I do have 4gb of ram, but i doubt i even use 3gb.

 

[VinDSL]

Short answer: No!

Longer answer: Maybe! All depends on your apps, but it isn't any faster in my experience...

Epilogue: I'm running x86 & x64 OSs in this lappy, and I can't tell any difference!

 

[MBrown]

It depends on your apps, but there is really no reason not to go x64.

 

[Nothinman]

Some niche things like A/V encoding can be faster but only if they're already CPU bound in your setup. It's generally a good idea to go with a 64-bit OS these days since you'll probably want/need it down the road but with only 4G of memory it might not be worth it to start over.

 

[Muadib]

Originally posted by: MBrown
It depends on your apps, but there is really no reason not to go x64.

I agree. At least if you need the extra memory it's there. With his current setup, he's wasting a gig of ram.

 

[F1shF4t]

If you can why not do it, saves you the trouble of having to do it later on and the extra usable 1gig of ram is a bonus (Superfetch will use it).
I skipped 32bit vista, but 8gig of ram was a good incentive to do so.

 

[her209]

CAD programs.

 

[Rifter]

7zip is also about 20-30% faster in 64bit. As more programs are designed to take full advantage they will become faster on 64bit, in theory i believe 64bit can be 4-5 times faster but i think it will take 5-10 years for software to catch up to that level. As soon as Microsoft goes 64bit only i think software will start to catch up real fast, probably with windows 8. For right now there is no reason not to go 64bit it will only get faster as time goes on.

 

[Sylvanas]

There is really no reason to be using 32bit anymore, with Vista everything that will claim to be 'Vista certified' must have a 64bit driver / software, so gone are the days of 'my printer doesn't work on 64bit'. Here is a benchmark of Ubuntu 32 vs 64bit and as you can see there are all round improvements with the 64bit OS- granted this is Windows we are talking about not Linux, but it serves as a point that 64bit can offer large all round gains over 32bit. From where we are today, on the brink of release of the 3rd major Microsoft OS to come in 64bit, the margin between the two can only grow as slowly but surely the software / OS is optimized for 64.

 

[Nothinman]

7zip is also about 20-30% faster in 64bit. As more programs are designed to take full advantage they will become faster on 64bit, in theory i believe 64bit can be 4-5 times faster but i think it will take 5-10 years for software to catch up to that level.

Too bad that's not really true. Things like 7zip are the exception and not the rule. The main things that most people use aren't CPU bound like web browsing, email, flash games, etc so they get little to no benefit from being 64-bit, the extra GPRs in long mode, etc.

From where we are today, on the brink of release of the 3rd major Microsoft OS to come in 64bit, the margin between the two can only grow as slowly but surely the software / OS is optimized for 64.

Not really, things will get faster because the hardware will get faster but being 64-bit has almost nothing to do with it. Faster chips, more cache, etc have much more to do with the performance of your machine than whether you're running the CPU in long mode or not.

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Too bad that's not really true. Things like 7zip are the exception and not the rule. The main things that most people use aren't CPU bound like web browsing, email, flash games, etc so they get little to no benefit from being 64-bit, the extra GPRs in long mode, etc.

Not to mention that those tests are done using the most advanced compression strategies on what, like, 2GB files? Yeah, I'm always zipping and unzipping hundreds of megabytes.

This is one of those "See? I can objectively prove that 200 browser tabs open lot faster." Great! Then all 50 people on the planet who would ever open that many browser tabs should definitely be using 64-bit.

Take a usage scenario that would drag a 32-bit computer to its knees, then compare it to 64-bit, nevermind 80% of computer users will NEVER encounter said usage scenario or would only rarely, at least for another several years.

 

[pm]

While there are plenty of apps that see performance improvements when switched to native 64-bit mode, there are plenty that don't see any improvment at all and in cases without optimization, code can slow down. There are programs that slow down when ported to 64-bit - for example programs that use a lot of pointers in code. The larger pointers take up more cache space reducing the amount of cache for other data. You don't need to use 64-bit pointers in 64-bit code - in fact, it's wasteful, but if you just push it through, it will be slower. There can also be more cache alignment issues if the programmer isn't careful.

If the programmer is careful, 64-bit code should end up being as fast as 32-bit, but if you just take a chunk of C code and a compiler and change the compilation flag to 64-bit, you will likely end up with code that is slower. I've seen it happen - a team that I was on ported a CAD tool for CPU design from 32-bit HPUX to 64-bit HPUX and watched performance go down considerably until the code was tweaked. Changing "ints" to "long long", keeping pointer sizes at 32-bits and other optimizations helped alleviate this and when all was said and done the 64-bit version ended up being faster than the 32-bit one.

Comparisons that show 32-bit vs. 64-bit performance:
Linux:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...article&item=616&num=1

Windows XP 64
http://www.tbreak.com/reviews/...pu&id=295&pagenumber=1

Vista 32-bit vs. Vista 64-bit
http://www.extremetech.com/art.../0,2845,2280811,00.asp

Check out the Lightwave 9 benchmark mid-way through that took 3x longer on 64-bit vs. versus 32-bit Vista.


Discussion about transitioning to 64-bits and issues with code and caches:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/co...n/articles/64_bit.html

This results in an increased memory footprint and can reduce hardware cache efficiency. Therefore, applications may actually see a performance loss. General performance expectations for applications that do not specifically leverage 64-bit features are +/- 10% of 32-bit applications.

 

[Nothinman]

Not to mention that those tests are done using the most advanced compression strategies on what, like, 2GB files? Yeah, I'm always zipping and unzipping hundreds of megabytes.

Well to be fair it's not a good test to zip up like 10M, the time differences would all fall into statistical noise.

This is one of those "See? I can objectively prove that 200 browser tabs open lot faster." Great! Then all 50 people on the planet who would ever open that many browser tabs should definitely be using 64-bit.

Well I do keep a lot of tabs open in multiple browsers so that actually matters to me, although that's more governed by the concurrency of the app itself.

 

[coolVariable]

As long as not even MS can get its programs running on 64bit ... I would stay away.
(e.g. OneNote 2007)

 

[Nothinman]

As long as not even MS can get its programs running on 64bit ... I would stay away.
(e.g. OneNote 2007)

Do you mean that it won't run at all or that it's just a 32-bit binary?

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: coolVariable
As long as not even MS can get its programs running on 64bit ... I would stay away.
(e.g. OneNote 2007)

What possible benefit do yo see having a native 64bit version of OneNote would provide? This constant clamoring for apps to be 64bit native when (for that app) it provides NO value is silly.

 

[coolVariable]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

As long as not even MS can get its programs running on 64bit ... I would stay away.
(e.g. OneNote 2007)

Do you mean that it won't run at all or that it's just a 32-bit binary?

Only runs with some functionality missing.
Big FAIL on MS' part.

Originally posted by: bsobel

Originally posted by: coolVariable
As long as not even MS can get its programs running on 64bit ... I would stay away.
(e.g. OneNote 2007)

What possible benefit do yo see having a native 64bit version of OneNote would provide? This constant clamoring for apps to be 64bit native when (for that app) it provides NO value is silly.

The benefit that it actually works?

 

[bsobel]

The benefit that it actually works?

Works fine here, what do you believe is broken?

 

[coolVariable]

Originally posted by: bsobel

The benefit that it actually works?

Works fine here, what do you believe is broken?

Google is your friend.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: coolVariable

Originally posted by: bsobel

The benefit that it actually works?

Works fine here, what do you believe is broken?

Google is your friend.

a) Your kind of douche. You come into a thread and complain something doesn't work, and then won't specify what that thing is.

b) So I googled it, and immedately found a solution http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/dav...a-64-bit-solution.aspx Maybe you should STFU and use google yourself sometime eh?

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

As long as not even MS can get its programs running on 64bit ... I would stay away.
(e.g. OneNote 2007)

Do you mean that it won't run at all or that it's just a 32-bit binary?

To clarify, one note runs fine. There is a printer driver included 'print to one note' that was available on the 32bit builds only.

 

[hazeman]

This is a great topic for me to check out cus I've been frantically scouring the net looking for comparative tests between Vista x86 and Vista 64.

I have noticed that most, if not all actually are basing results from the original retail version of Vista/Vista 64 and the rest being SP1.

I'm personally not too worried about applications running or not on the 64-bit version (SP2) due to the hotfixes included with this Service Pack. Finding signed drivers seems to be the biggest issue at this point, especially with devices hot off the press(es) if you catch my drift.

And to keep the keeping the OT in mind, the switch does in fact seem beneficial since the 64-bit architecture is utilized in some very "neat" ways with the Vista 64 kernel. Some of which should due away with a lot of malware attacks-- as well as increasing efficiency for future AV engines.

Lastly, the post about the 32-bit versus 64-bit benchmarks is almost 14 months old now. Relevant? Well, SP2 has been released since then as well as updates to PCMark Vantage.

 

[coolVariable]

Originally posted by: bsobel

Originally posted by: coolVariable

Originally posted by: bsobel

The benefit that it actually works?

Works fine here, what do you believe is broken?

Google is your friend.

a) Your kind of douche. You come into a thread and complain something doesn't work, and then won't specify what that thing is.

b) So I googled it, and immedately found a solution http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/dav...a-64-bit-solution.aspx Maybe you should STFU and use google yourself sometime eh?

You're the douche, @sswipe. Thank you for enlightening the discussion with your name calling.

MS very obviously doesn't support 64bit if they cannot even get their own programs to run 100% without issues with 100% functionality. Using some third party hack to fix it, doesn't make it ok. WinXP already came in 64bit and they still cannot address the issues with OneNote 2007?

And that 20 step solution you found. Great! It is about as complicated as printing pages with a color printer and scanning them back in as images. GREAT SOLUTION, moron.

Until then: stay away from 64bit unless you know all your programs run fine with it.

 

[Nothinman]

MS very obviously doesn't support 64bit if they cannot even get their own programs to run 100% without issues with 100% functionality.

It's pretty obvious that you've never done any amount of software development in your life and right now I'd even venture to say that you must be new to computers in general. Every piece of software is released with known issues and caveats, it's pretty much impossible to write software that is 100% bug free and supports all of the features that you had initially planned. And print drivers are probably one of the absolute worst. Printing is one of the few things that universally sucks on every platform out there. And hell, everytime a discussion like this happens and someone decides to be smart and post a simple "Hello World" program people always find bugs with which to prove their point in even something as simple as that.

And that 20 step solution you found. Great! It is about as complicated as printing pages with a color printer and scanning them back in as images. GREAT SOLUTION, moron.

Wow, 20 steps? I see 2 and that's only if you count installing XPS2OneNote as a separate step. How is "Choose print to the XPS Doc Writer" more difficult than "Choose Print to One Note?

Until then: stay away from 64bit unless you know all your programs run fine with it.

Duh. That's just plain common sense.

And is One Note the only thing you've got an issue with? Because crying this much about 1 application seems pretty petty.

 

[coolVariable]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

It's pretty obvious that you've never done any amount of software development in your life and right now I'd even venture to say that you must be new to computers in general. Every piece of software is released with known issues and caveats, it's pretty much impossible to write software that is 100% bug free and supports all of the features that you had initially planned. And print drivers are probably one of the absolute worst. Printing is one of the few things that universally sucks on every platform out there. And hell, everytime a discussion like this happens and someone decides to be smart and post a simple "Hello World" program people always find bugs with which to prove their point in even something as simple as that.

I would say you are pretty new to computers ... and let me guess. You are 12 years old?

MS can't support 64bit 7 years after they released a 64bith OS?
That means 64bit still is not ready for primetime in my book.

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Wow, 20 steps? I see 2 and that's only if you count installing XPS2OneNote as a separate step. How is "Choose print to the XPS Doc Writer" more difficult than "Choose Print to One Note?

Here's two suggestions. Use Onenote under 32bit and compare that to the "solution" offered here.

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Duh. That's just plain common sense.

And is One Note the only thing you've got an issue with? Because crying this much about 1 application seems pretty petty.

If the maker of a 64bit OS cannot even support it 7 years after it was first released ...