Windows XP 64-Bit Preview: First Look at Athlon 64 Performance
by Wesley Fink on February 7, 2004 12:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
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.
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Boonesmi - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
sweet :)ksumom - Wednesday, June 23, 2010 - link
Have any of you tried to hook a printer up to the windows 64 bit?My daughter is trying to find a printer thats compatable with it