TBreak have a new article out that looks at the performance difference between the 32 and 64-bit version of Windows! Here's a snip.
One of the biggest advantages of the Athlon64 is, well, 64-bit computing. It will be quite a while until we see a complete shift to a 64-bit Operating System/Applications environment, however the process has started. Microsoft has already made a freely downloadable beta version of Windows XP-64 Bit Edition while drivers have also started appearing from the likes of nVidia, Creative, VIA and Silicon Image. On the applications side, since the Athlon64 is completely backward compatible, you should have no problems running any 32-bit applications on a 32-bit Operating System. The problem comes when you try to run 32-bit applications on a 64-bit O/S and although Microsoft supports a ?32-bit? compatibility mode in its Windows XP 64-bit Edition, you will run into problems with certain applications like the Adobe Acrobat 5.0 which is a part of the Sysmark 2004 benchmarking suite. Similarly, Windows Media Encoder 9 also refused to install while Aquamark 3 installed but refused to run.
However, compatibility isn?t the focus of this article- benchmarking is. Sometime back, we internally benchmarked Windows XP-64 bit Edition with 32-bit apps and found that a lot of work needed to be done to bring the performance level at least on par with running the same applications on a 32-bit O/S. With the release of 64-bit drivers for the nForce3 platform from nVidia, we decided to re-benchmark these applications in both 32-bit and 64-bit version of Windows XP and see if the performance gap has closed in or not. That is precisely what this article is about and without further wait, lets take a look at the testbed.
64-bit vs 32-bit AMD Performance
One of the biggest advantages of the Athlon64 is, well, 64-bit computing. It will be quite a while until we see a complete shift to a 64-bit Operating System/Applications environment, however the process has started. Microsoft has already made a freely downloadable beta version of Windows XP-64 Bit Edition while drivers have also started appearing from the likes of nVidia, Creative, VIA and Silicon Image. On the applications side, since the Athlon64 is completely backward compatible, you should have no problems running any 32-bit applications on a 32-bit Operating System. The problem comes when you try to run 32-bit applications on a 64-bit O/S and although Microsoft supports a ?32-bit? compatibility mode in its Windows XP 64-bit Edition, you will run into problems with certain applications like the Adobe Acrobat 5.0 which is a part of the Sysmark 2004 benchmarking suite. Similarly, Windows Media Encoder 9 also refused to install while Aquamark 3 installed but refused to run.
However, compatibility isn?t the focus of this article- benchmarking is. Sometime back, we internally benchmarked Windows XP-64 bit Edition with 32-bit apps and found that a lot of work needed to be done to bring the performance level at least on par with running the same applications on a 32-bit O/S. With the release of 64-bit drivers for the nForce3 platform from nVidia, we decided to re-benchmark these applications in both 32-bit and 64-bit version of Windows XP and see if the performance gap has closed in or not. That is precisely what this article is about and without further wait, lets take a look at the testbed.
64-bit vs 32-bit AMD Performance
