Win 64 Bit And Win 32 Bit - What Is Your Experience?

[dave_boo]

First off all a lot of thanks to all of you for your explanations. I started with the idea the 64 bit might be always faster than 32 bit - at least if you use true 64 bit applications. In the meantime I have learned that I was somehow naive.

We all learn as we go.

Of course all drivers and the BIOS are the latest for XP, Win7 32 and Win 64. But this does not mean much. New versions and new problems...

I will make the test that you mentioned with no HT and no Turbo Boost and others. Just give me time until Thursday since I have a visit here.

I actually should have thought about that earlier; my apologies.

I will set up a ram disk and make tests from there even if then there is not much memory left. Swapfile I will block (set to 0) - it was blocked anyway during the other tests to avoid false data because of this.

Just use a smaller video file and try it; the only problem is that going with a smaller file may make the differences fall within the margin of error and you'll have a false impression of the improvement or regression.

If anybody has a free test I should run let me know - I still have here WinXP SP3, Win 7 32 and Win 7 64. But again be aware that this will benchmark my system and might be no guidance at all for others.

So welo for instance if you have a test that I should run let me know.

In respect of the RAID 0 output that dave_boo mentioned. It is higher than 150. See pictures. The Intel RAID 0 Volume is of course the RAID. The other disk is exactly the same Seagate with the same firmware without RAID. But the RAID picture is confusing too. The performance does not fall down much and so I am afraid I might be at the limit of the interface already and an additional disk might not bring much more. But I am not sure.

There is also the possibility that you have data on the third Seagate...that would explain the tumble in the numbers. And I'd assume your RAID array is still virgin and the drop in performance shouldn't be so bad. To be honest I'd be more worried about those access times; they're fairly high. Would adding another disk not net any extra performance? I can't answer that. I would think you'd be able to without incident since the controller isn't confined to PCI speeds.

If you need a lot of memory you are completely right. There is no other option than 64 bit.

But 4 GB is a lot already for most applications - at least for mine. The difference between the 3.5 GB with 32 and 4 GB with 64 is not so big if you take into account that Win 64 will eat up more anyway for itself and for the 64 bit software.

I always run the swap file at 0 and so far no application complained. Not true - there is a game that asks for the swap file at startup even if it has enough memory available.

But just look at the graph in my picture. The first small upside is when Sony Vegas with the video project was started and the next one when Vegas started to render (this in WinXP and MANY other applications running). I does not use much memory - the total for everything what is running is not even 50 percent. So some GB more will not bring more I am afraid at least in my case.

But what you can do is run 64bit, install like 12GB of RAM and create a RAMDRIVE which will save wear and tear on your hdd.....ask me how I know :ninja:

[welo]

Is the harddrive performance the same on 32bit and 64bit Windows 7?

welo

[Pib]

Maybe a good comparison between the Win 7 64 bit and Win 7 32 bit versions is the the 64 bit version does a process in a half of a blink of eye compared to the 32 bit version doing it in a blink of an eye (this assumes your hardware and software is optimized for Win 7 64 bit). Ok, now blink your eyes to test the speed comparison. (grin)

[welo]

Maybe a good comparison between the Win 7 64 bit and Win 7 32 bit versions is the the 64 bit version does a process in a half of a blink of eye compared to the 32 bit version doing it in a blink of an eye (this assumes your hardware and software is optimized for Win 7 64 bit). Ok, now blink your eyes to test the speed comparison. (grin)

(speechless)

[Beggar]

As promissed here are the results of my performance testing according your questions. My system data: I7-860, 4 GB RAM, 4 Seagate 1 TB with 2 of them in RAID 0, MBO Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6, no over clock, swap file off.

The results show that 64 bit does not bring much performance gain if not even a performance loss at least at my system setup. What brings a lot is HT (Hyperthreading).

Sony Vegas

=========

It was again faster in 32 bit than in 64 bit in the range I wrote originally. Then I tested Sony Vegas in Win7 64 bit with different CPU settings in the BIOS as requested (duration minutes:seconds):

2:47 HT on and Turbo Boost on

3:30 HT off and Turbo Boost on

3:32 HT on and Turbo Boost off

So it seems to make sense to have a CPU with HT for Vegas. Picture 1 shows the cores for Vegas with HT on and picture 2 without HT. P1...P8 are the cores (PT is CPU total, F1 is the speed of the CPU fan, the small red line shows the peak). It shows that without HT the CPU has a lot more of work to do with the smaller amount of cores. If you switch Turbo Boost off then the performance goes down a lot too (HT was on in this case).

Sony Vegas could not be tested with a RAM disk since I do not have enough memory installed - Vegas needs a lot of input data. Input data were on RAID 0 and output on a non RAID disk.

WinRAR

======

I took new files. Very small files with high compression rate. I created a RAM disk and ran WinRAR from there, ran it from RAID 0 and from a non RAID disk. Compression level was BEST. The data were always the same.

Win7 64 Bit with WinRAR 64 bit - HT in WinRAR settings off and on

3:04 RAM disk with HT off

3:47 RAID 0 disk with HT off

2:14 RAM disk with HT on

2:21 RAID 0 disk with HT on

2:13 NON-RAID disk with HT on

So HT makes sense here again. But what you can see here too is that RAID 0 does not always win. WinRAR had many small files and is heavy on the CPU side. So RAID was actually in this case slower than a NON-RAID disk. Interesting too that the performance between RAM disk and HD is pretty much the same. So the HD is not a bottleneck in this case. WinRAR seems to be pretty much on the CPU side.

Win7 32 bit with WinRAR 32 bit - HT in WinRAR always on

2:24 RAM disk with HT on

2:26 RAID 0 disk with HT on

The 32 bit Win7 is a bit slower than the Win 7 65 bit version. But this can be caused by a difference in coding too. So hard to judge what is faster - 32 or 64 bit.

It was interesting to see for me that the HD in the case of WinRAR is not the bottleneck. So no idea where else I might lose the performance since my CPU cores are not at 100 percent. But they go to almost 100 percent if needed if you disable HT for instance or run FSX with the Acceleration Package (multi core then) or a benchmark.

Edited December 17, 2009 by Beggar

[welo]

Isn't the the new result different from the one original posted?

test run 1

WinRAR 32 bit 6:34

WinRAR 64 bit 7:56

64bit 20% slower than 32bit

test run 2 (test results from RAM disk with HT on)

WinRAR 32bit 2:24

WinRAR 64bit 2:14

64bit 7% faster than 32bit

The new WinRAR results make more sense to me. However, I still cannot really tell what should be expected since I don't have any in-depth know how of what algorithms file compressors use, and if and how they should benefit from 64bit (compare Longbottom's integer and floating point benchmarks).

Didn't find anything specific on WinRARs 64bit performance and used instruction sets (SSE2 etc) - still think this is mainly compiler work.

About Sony Vegas: Still googling around to find benchmark comparisons between 32bit and 64bit. Didn't find anything so far. One forum post mentioned something about the problem of plugins not supporting 64bit.

welo

[Beggar]

Isn't the the new result different from the one original posted?

The data are not the same. Because of the RAM disk size I had to take much less and so different data - I have only 4 GB mem installed. The new test was done with about 1 GB and the old with about 5 GB. The original 32 bit test was in addition done with WinXP SP3. On top of this I set the compression level for the new results to BEST from NORMAL (original data) to get more work for the CPU because of the smaller data size. I tried to find out if the CPU gets more work done with 64 bit and not so much the rest of the system.

[welo]

The data are not the same.

Sure, I was referring not to the absolute results but to the comparison 32bit vs 64bit. Interestingly this time (at least with winRAR) 64bit performed as expected (slight advantage). Because to me the big question is still why in your first test 32-bit Windows 7 outperformed 64-bit Windows 7 that much (~20%).

So if your say that this time the benchmark is more CPU centric, than for me this still means something is slowing down your 64bit Windows 7. At least in that specific test you originally posted.

welo

[Pib]

Looking more and more like a blink-of-an-eye compared to half a blink-of-an-eye speed comparison. For the routine/home user not doing some task which is extremely graphics/calculation intensive and takes 5, 10, or more minutes to complete, a Win 32 OS is just fine. Going with a 64 bit OS requires the program software and hardware to be specifically "peaked" to 64 bit operations to gain any real world/easily noticeable increase in speed. I know it's easy to think that 64 bit OS/programs/hardware should be twice as fast as its 32 bit version, but that linear relationship just ain't there...aint' even close.

Blink...blink...blink....

[welo]

Looking more and more like a blink-of-an-eye compared to half a blink-of-an-eye speed compariso[...] I know it's easy to think that 64 bit [...] should be twice as fast as its 32 bit version, but that linear relationship just ain't there...aint' even close.

Pib, you've been the only person in that thread suggesting that 64bit should be twice as fast as 32bit software

a 10-20% difference in performance is definitely more than a 'blink of an eye', especially when we talk about time-consuming encoding/transcoding jobs and the OP is doing them regularly.

Furthermore, look at the price difference between two Intel CPUs that differ 20% in performance.

welo

[Beggar]

I tested Sony Vegas again to be on the safe side:

WinXP SP3 32 bit - 2:42 !!!

Win7 32 bit - 2:51

Win7 64 bit - 3:34

Then I checked the disk performance. Here first copy from RAID 0 to a non RAID disk:

WinXP SP3 32 bit - 0:36 !!!

Win7 32 bit - 0:45

Win7 64 bit - 0:45

Copy RAID 0 to RAID 0 - same disk:

WinXP SP3 32 bit - 1:51 !!!

Win7 32 bit - 1:10

Win7 64 bit - 1:11

So Vegas does not like the new OS so much at least at my system. The Sony Version was the latest Sony Vegas Pro 9.0c 32 and 64 bit.

In respect of copy WinXP was faster from disk to a different disk. But when it comes to copy from a disk to the same disk both Win7 OS seem to use bigger buffer. You can hear that the OS does not access so often. I repeated the test several times. WinXP was much slower.

WinXP had a lot of programs and services loaded and running while test were made. I cannot switch off all of them. The Win7 OS were clean.

Edited December 19, 2009 by Beggar

[trogers]

DVD conversion time using ConverXtoDVD is 2.5 times faster on my Win7 64-bit laptop than the 32-bit PC.

Slowdown is only during burning on the laptop - writer can only burn at 4x.

[sedeflonga]

I think the winner was pretty clear in the end

Doesn't mean the best product won out<_<

My 64-bit Acer laptop was first running on 32-bit XP, and recently I did a fresh install of Win 7 64-bit.

The latter is much faster, especially running with FF, Thunderbird, Comodo and Avira, all in 64bit.

On the beginning its always faster. After some time you will be surprised how laggy it can get...

[dave_boo]

As a side note, sometimes 64 bit can be MUCH faster than 32...however that's more because of development than any technical reason. I've attached a benchmark from Phoronix's review of the Asus 1201N to illustrate what I'm on about.

Now compare this benchmark, which is much more what the OP is trying to look at; notice that going with a 64 bit OS is only netting 10% more performance (fps).

[welo]

The interesting issue here is that Sony Vegas on Win7 64 bit performs significantly worse than its 32bit counterpart, seeing a 20% performance drop instead of the expected (slight) performance advantage.

My guess is that the culprit is with Sony Vegas not with Windows 7 in general. Since the re-run of the WinRAR benchmark brought the expected result (slight performance advantage on 64bit), one might assume that Sony Vegas (or maybe your setup of Sony Vegas) is underperforming.

Tried to find articles/posts on that topic on the internet but was not really successful. Seems that one problem is that some of the plugins have not yet been converted to 64bit, not sure though whether as of today this is still a problem - maybe the plugins used for encoding are different in 32bit and 64bit Vegas and the 64bit version is performing worse.

http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/903267

Which version do you run? There seems to be a version 9.0c out which fixes several issues. Continuing from here, posting in a dedicated video forum might yield better results to speed up your Sony Vegas setup.

welo

[bankruatsteve]

No tests/benchmarks will be valid comparison unless you have software written for the target OS. IE: there's probably not much comercial software out there for 64bit. Wait, it will be and then it will blow away anything else given the memory to support.

[welo]

No tests/benchmarks will be valid comparison unless you have software written for the target OS. IE: there's probably not much commercial software out there for 64bit. Wait, it will be and then it will blow away anything else given the memory to support.

64bit Windows is not the newcomer you might think it is. Windows XP 64bit was released April 2005, Vista 64bit was released 2006 (at the same time as its 32bit version).

There is a lot of 64bit software out there, both free and commercial. Especially professional software that makes heavy use of CPU and memory (e.g. video and audio editing, rendering and encoding such as discussed in this thread) should offer 64bit versions of its software, and from what I know it actually does. However, my impression is that adaption of 64bit was rather slow and some products still need more work on optimizing the 64bit code.

This seems to be the case with Sony Vegas, too, I just found a thread from October 2009 where somebody describes howto run 32bit Vegas on 64bit Vista, since 'Codec developers, as of late have yet to develop 64-bit codecs'.

All that said, this thread here made me really wonder whether Win7 64-bit was the right choice for my 3GB Core Duo 2 Laptop!?

welo

welo

[bankruatsteve]

No tests/benchmarks will be valid comparison unless you have software written for the target OS. IE: there's probably not much commercial software out there for 64bit. Wait, it will be and then it will blow away anything else given the memory to support.

64bit Windows is not the newcomer you might think it is. Windows XP 64bit was released April 2005, Vista 64bit was released 2006 (at the same time as its 32bit version).

There is a lot of 64bit software out there, both free and commercial. Especially professional software that makes heavy use of CPU and memory (e.g. video and audio editing, rendering and encoding such as discussed in this thread) should offer 64bit versions of its software, and from what I know it actually does. However, my impression is that adaption of 64bit was rather slow and some products still need more work on optimizing the 64bit code.

This seems to be the case with Sony Vegas, too, I just found a thread from October 2009 where somebody describes howto run 32bit Vegas on 64bit Vista, since 'Codec developers, as of late have yet to develop 64-bit codecs'.

All that said, this thread here made me really wonder whether Win7 64-bit was the right choice for my 3GB Core Duo 2 Laptop!?

welo

welo

My main point was that to take advantage of 64 bit processing, you need a LOT of memory. How many PC's do you know of that hold a terabyte of RAM? As to software, I still don't see very many commercial applications that are native 64 bit. But, I don't have a 64 bit machine so no personal experience. I do know that the performance from 32 to 64 bit on mainframes was phenomenal back in the early 70's.

Cheers