Windows 7 64-bit - What's the point?

trentlad said:
Ok so going by most responses, the memory really is the main benefit which is important if required in mass by your applications (i.e. CAD, rendering, Virtual Machines,etc). Another point that I really liked was how installing 64-bit OS is more of an encouragement to get the ball rolling on 64-bit apps, if there are way more people on a 32-bit OS then developers are bound to feed the masses over the minority.
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With Vista's release came new drivers reqs, all drivers submitted to Microsoft for signing had to be supplied in both 32Bit and 64Bit. If both weren't supplied, Microsoft wouldn't sign them. If you're hardware is 4 years old it will have 64bit drivers. If you install 32bit now you're creating yourself unnecessary work and limiting your systems potential. You'll forget you're even using a 64bit system within a day :).


Trentland said:
The 64-bit driver issues I had before were mostly with Vista 64-bit. Back when the 4870 was first released, the amount that bugger crashed on 64-bit drivers was annoying a hell. I had a dual boot with XP and it ran seamlessly on 32-bit drivers.
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Not a fair comparison. Did you try the card with Vista 32bit? When Vista was released a lot of the underlying code was changed compared to XP. Hardware companies had to write completely new drivers with new optimizations, the buggy drivers probably affected both the 32Bit and 64Bit versions of Windows.

Of course the drivers for XP were more stable, XP's been public since 2001 so hardware manufacturers have had years to optimize drivers.

Trentlad said:
There were only a couple of other driver issues but it didn't seem worth tackling them again. Sounds like most issues with 64-bit drivers have had enough time to be ironed out now.

Cheers peeps.
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For me 64Bit has been usable since Vista's release but others may disagree.
 
Burnsy2023 said:
The x64 distribution of Windows does have more differences than that, features such as PatchGuard.
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Yeah I know they (for some reason) insist on differentiating the products, though they always seem to make the x64 variant slightly better rather than the other way round. And of course the x64 OS will have the x86 compatibility layer.

But what I meant was fundamentally, at the very base level, an x86 and an x64 OS will be identical in the real world aside from the amount of memory the x64 OS can address.

I guess my point was more geared towards reversing the OPs question. Why x86 rather than x64, but I think this thread has pretty much summed that up as well.
 
theheyes said:
Well, there is quite a lot of difference between 32 and 64 bit depending on how you look at it. Microsoft have recommended for a while that the "bitness" of the OS matches the CPU. I don't know how these OEMs get away with selling machines with 4GB of RAM and 32 bit Windows.
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they like to play it safe with win 32bit
saves them getting calls all the time about hardware n software problems
 
trentlad said:
Is this true? I haven't really seen anything to back up a statement like this, it's usually been hearsay more than fact.
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There is no feasible reason something compiled and run through a 64 bit instruction set on a cpu should run any more quickly than on the standard x86 instruction set.

I *suppose* it could be that the x64 instructions are simply more refined in places, but i'd hope Intel et al. update the x86 things as well!

From a programming perspective, typically you normally just make two profiles in your IDE of choice and compile for both, the codebase itself tends to stay the same.

The only performance increases you should see using something as a 64 bit app natively is the same performance increases you would expect to see in any system with more addressable memory, be it 64 bit or 32 bit, the difference being the upper limit in a 64 bit system is significantly higher than in a 32 bit system.

So, if you take two identical systems, install 32 bit Win 7 on one and 64 bit on the other, assuming you then take identical (bar the designated architecture) system drivers, and identical pieces of software (bar their architecture), and ensure you will never address more memory than is available to the 32 bit system, and turn off the swap file on both, you should get effectively identical performance (unpredictability of a scheduled OS aside).
 
There is massive boost in performance for any applications that do very intensive number calculations such as encryption. Being able to use 64bit numbers allows for greater precision in floating point numbers for example.

The registers are also larger and more numerous, which means for larger amounts of data the CPU has to do less shuffling around to get the right data in the registers.
 
SiriusB said:
There is massive boost in performance for any applications that do very intensive number calculations such as encryption. Being able to use 64bit numbers allows for greater precision in floating point numbers for example.

The registers are also larger and more numerous, which means for larger amounts of data the CPU has to do less shuffling around to get the right data in the registers.
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The register thing is definitely a potential booster, I had forgotten about that. As far as using 64 bit floats though, I thought there was still the usual hit in performance using true IEEE doubles as with a 32 bit system?

Certainly I notice no difference in the slowdown I get from using doubles in my code compared to singles in x86 or x64.

Be genuinely interested if you could provide me with some reading material as being stuck with single precision floating point for some of the work I do (for performance reasons) is very annoying!
 
I have nothing specific, just stuff I have picked up over the years. Someone like NathanE knows way, way waaay more about this kind of stuff than me, hopefully he will stop by. With lots of lovely links knowing him :D
 
I've had XP 64bit, Vista 64bit, and 7 64bit - so to use 32bit would have been a step backwards.

For home use, I haven't found anything yet that won't work.

At work when we move from XP to 7 (this year) we're also going to be making the 32bit to 64bit jump. Odds on everything working as smoothly as it does at home?
 
I have set up a number of new laptops at a client with Windows 7 64 Pro. No real issues so far. In fact, the only niggles they have had are down to Windows 7 not being XP lol. 64bitness hasn't changed a thing as far as I can see.
 
If your a standard home user that doesn't have more than 4gb of ram and only does generic email, web browsing etc. by going 64bit your not actually losing out at all on anything. 32bit and 64bit will both work in exactly the same way for them kind of tasks.

As far as I can see there really is no point in going for 32bit over 64bit (ignoring the potential tiny ammount of compatibility issues with really old programs). If you've got the hardware to support 64bit (i.e. a 64bit CPU etc) then go for it regardless of what you will or won't do on it.
 
Just go 64bit, most thing work. I have it on 5 PC's with no issues at all with a different hardware, software, printers, devices, etc.

RAM is cheap, take advantage and get your self set for the future of 64bit
 
Way i see it why would'nt you install in a 64bit operating system, i've used 64bit for maybe 3 years and only had trouble with software and drivers etc for the first few months and that was it.
 
DIABLO said:
Way i see it why would'nt you install in a 64bit operating system, i've used 64bit for maybe 3 years and only had trouble with software and drivers etc for the first few months and that was it.
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Same here but had minor issue with Win7 64bit, had a few with Vista 64 but Win7 really is brilliant.
 
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