Final Words

It is really exciting to finally be able to run benchmarks on an Athlon 64 on a 64-bit XP Operating System, even if Windows XP 64-bit is just a Customer Preview right now.  When Anand attempted to run 64-bit benchmarks during the Athlon 64 launch about 4 months ago, only one of our 32-bit benchmarks would even run under XP64.  Things have progressed quite a bit since then.  We now have a 64-bit version of Sandra 2004, and all of our standard game benchmarks ran on XP64 except Aquamark 3.  While Winstone 2004 benches would not install, we expect that will be fixed in the near future.

The actual performance under Windows XP 64-bit Preview showed great promise, but it is still something of a mixed bag.  We were impressed that the CPU, Floating Point, and memory ALL showed performance improvement in XP64 compared to regular XP.  This promises that we will eventually see the performance improvements in applications that is potentially there in the move to 64-bit extensions.  We were also impressed with the 15%+ improvement in Media Encoding when running the same 32-bit encoding program under XP and XP64.  Performance of current 32-bit games under SP64, however, was below expectations.

Anand's 64-bit testing with Linux at launch showed we could expect a 10% to 20% increase in performance with a 64-bit OS for the Athlon 64.  Certainly we don't see anything in these early tests that would change that expectation when running 64-bit programs under Windows XP 64-bit.  However, there are still unanswered concerns about how current 32-bit software, in particular games, will run on the release version of Windows XP 64-bit.  Drivers and further optimizations will certainly improve and possibly remove this 20% performance penalty in gaming.  This is, after all, a preview version with immature drivers and almost no graphics support.  We have no doubt after this preview that 64-bit applications will run faster, but we really don't yet have an answer to the question of how existing 32-bit games will run.  We should have a better answer to this in the next few months.

Microsoft's last major preview release was Windows XP.  One of the things that public preview accomplished was to push manufacturers to quickly update their drivers for the new Operating System.  You will be frustrated searching for drivers to get the best performance from XP64 Preview, but the release of the free Preview version will speed up that process considerably.  Nothing seems to get action from manufacturers faster than consumers screaming for driver updates.  Perhaps that was Microsoft's plan, a very clever one, to push manufacturers into completing work on 64-bit drivers for the new Operating System.

If you enjoy the bleeding edge, then by all means give the public preview of Windows XP 64-bit a whirl.  We do suggest you use the caution of setting it up on a separate drive or installing your current OS as a multi-boot with XP64 preview.  In general we are impressed with the demonstrated potential of XP64, and we are anxious to see how far drivers and updates will take performance of current 32-bit games.

Media Encoding and Gaming Benchmarks
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  • Staples - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link

    I really hope those game scores are due to premature video drivers. As you see, Halo did almost as well as the 32bit platform and as you should know, DX9 games are almost solely based on the GPU. So if Halo did almost as well on both platforms, it says that the video drivers can't be that premature, either that or explanation 2 is that we can expect a huge increase in DX9 games.
  • Corsairpro - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link

    Too bad there weren't any decent video drivers. Every one who just glances at the numbers is going to claim "The message is clear x86-64 has failed" when it comes to games. Oh well, more supply for me to buy!
  • buleyb - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link

    Not that I'm not excited, but you should point out Wes that this isn't just a 64bit OS, but an AMD 64bit OS, meaning that the performance improvement has a lot to do with the new general purpose registers and such. I don't want people thinking that 64bit is a pure performance improvement, because it really isn't by itself.

    But still, nice work :)
  • KristopherKubicki - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link

    Skol. Well done Wes.
  • saechaka - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link

    boy am i glad i just bought this athlon 64 notebook. huurraaayy for me
  • Wesley Fink - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link

    There are times editing would be useful in this comments section. XP, and not Halo, had about the same performance.
  • Wesley Fink - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link

    Halo was the game that was close to the same performance in XP and XP64, and not Halo as #4 pointed out. Since X2 is DirectX 8.1 with heavy use of transform and lighting effects, it has little relevance to the Halo performance. Corrected in the article.
  • Emma - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link

    "It is very interesting that the DirectX 9 game Halo is already very close to 32-bit performance at only 4% slower than 32-bit performance. This means the newest 32-bit games, or at least the newest games from Microsoft, may be as fast on 64-bit as 32-bit at the launch of XP64, or possibly even faster."

    Can you clarify this please. The table shows there being a -19.1% change...
  • Boonesmi - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link

    by the way ive read in several threads of guys using pcmark 2004 and getting incredible fps in divx encoding
  • Ecmaster76 - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link

    Very interesting. That 15% increase in media encoding should have the AMD execs laughing maniacally. That might end up getting them a 15% increase in market share.