View Full Version : 64bit slower than 32bit !?
Charles Pegge
21-01-2010, 11:35
Are 64-bit Binaries Really Slower than 32-bit Binaries?
Can this really be true or is it an urban myth? Look at those benchmarks...
http://www.osnews.com/story/5768
Petr Schreiber
21-01-2010, 15:35
In some of the tests there has been quite a observable difference.
What is your real-life observation of 32bit vs. 64bit performance Charles?
Petr
Charles Pegge
21-01-2010, 18:17
I have yet to find out, Petr. But I reckon that 64bit can make a significant difference at the OS level where the lowest level functions can make use of the extra registers as local variables, saving memory read/writes. However for general programming the speed benefit is going to be insignificant when compared with all the other technical innovations.
Outdated article.. (Thu 22nd Jan 2004)
Will guess that something have evolved the last 5-6 years..
I see a substantial difference when running win64 on the same computer I ran win32 on.
This is my gaming computer and in the new games there is a noticeable improvement, like Unreal Tournament 3, Company of Heroes, Crysis.
Photoshop runs much nicer too.
Charles Pegge
22-01-2010, 06:45
I've found some more recent benchmarking articles:
32bit versus 64bit performance
2006 VISTA ~+10%
http://64-bit-computers.com/windows-vista-32-bit-vs-64-bit-benchmark.html
2008 VISTA
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2280808,00.asp
2009 UBUNTU 9 ~+5 to +10%
http://www.tuxradar.com/content/ubuntu-904-32-bit-vs-64-bit-benchmarks
You can see from the bar charts that general performance gains are quite small.