Worth upgrading to 64bit?

[Foxi4]

"64 bit" itself will not give you any kind of performance boost. 64 bit applications do not run faster than their 32 bit counterparts. The only benefit to "upgrading" to a 64 bit OS is that you can have more than 3 GiB RAM. Generally it is adviced to stay on 32 bit as long as you don't need that extra RAM, as 32 bit applications and drivers are usually more stable and faster.

In addition, there is very little performance difference between 2 GB RAM and more, for general computer use.

Yes, it does matter. Compatibility issues are a thing of the past - it's a myth and it should be ostracized. Everyday applications take full advantage of a 64bit system - it's the games that sometimes have issues because users actually believe that for some reason 32bit computing is more stable. It's not. Fair play, 3GB RAM is the recommended value, but not the minimal one. It'll work perfectly fine on 2 if you apply tweaks.

EDIT: Just to add a little bit of Layman's perspective, a processor that was manufactured to work with a 64bit system (and not the first-generation ones, mind you - 64bit has been around for a while now) is like a double-decker bus. Working in 32bit mode, you're "driving it" while only using the bottom floor for passengers, and for what? Because the chances of it toppling over are smaller? Nah.

Let's say that a program wants to pass a 64bit-long word. In 32bit mode, it has to divide it into a few operations rather than doing it in one go - hence the performance difference. The trade-off is a higher RAM requirement, but hey! Welcome to the future - progress requires sacrifices. All in all, it *is* a performance improvement.

 

[Rydian]

Note that in the charts, the closer a test is to real-world actions end-users take, the less the difference between the two is.

Compression's the obvious exception, as it's one of the number-crunching things end users actually do (what with converting video and audio formats, even in itunes).

 

[yusuo]

Well ive been running at 64 bit for 2 days now, and although I haven't seen a massive difference globally I thought I would run a little test in Adobe premiere, basically encoding a clip that I made while I was still 32 bit. 32 bit took about 3 minutes to encode a 1:30 min clip where as 64 bit took a little over a minute to do the same job. So i'm happy for now, just kind of shocked at the lack of 64bit native apps out there, such as commercial anti-viruses, Ive got avast running in 32bit mode it does the job but im really surprised they don't have a 64 bit equivalent.

 

[redfalcon]

So i'm happy for now, just kind of shocked at the lack of 64bit native apps out there, such as commercial anti-viruses, Ive got avast running in 32bit mode it does the job but im really surprised they don't have a 64 bit equivalent.

What for? Its an Anti-Virus programm. It doesn't need 3 GiB of memory.

 

[Foxi4]

What for? Its an Anti-Virus programm. It doesn't need 3 GiB of memory.

For the reasons I explained earlier.

Most of the maths a processor has to perform are Integer Maths, and in 64bit mode, the processor is capable of processing a much higher amount of data due to using longer words. That equals faster scanning, and faster scanning equals a happy user.

By running the program via WOW64, you're making it run *slower* than it normally would on a 32bit system - you're leaking performance.

Seeing that 64bit processors have been around for years now, it boggles me why companies are still not releasing those versions as the default ones and 32bit equivalents as the "legacy" ones.

 

[redfalcon]

Most of the maths a processor has to perform are Integer Maths, and in 64bit mode, the processor is capable of processing a much higher amount of data due to using longer words. That equals faster scanning, and faster scanning equals a happy user.

The bottleneck on AV-scans is more likely the harddisk (read speed) than the processor. The scanning of an actual file may be faster, but the overall duration on a full system scan should be neglible.