THinking of upgrading to WinXP 64bit

[tooie32]

Hi all for a while I have been using WinXP 32bit for both gaming and 3d meshing.

I am thinking of getting WinXP Pro 64bit but I like some input before I buy the operating system I want to know if it will be a worth of an upgrade and will there be improvments to the computers performance. I do alot of 3d meshing and most of the time when I render it take hours for a render to complete and when I use these high poly meshes it just slows the computer down were it takes 5 min to make a small adjustment.

I do want to keep my current hardware for a while longer untill I have enough money to make the hardware upgrades.

So should it be worth the money to get the 64bit version?


Carl

[spudmonkey]

Upgrading the operating system from 32-bit to 64-bit may or may not improve application performance. Most 32-bit applications need a certain level of recoding before they can take advantage of 64-bit processors. More memory, better processor(s) and faster I/O on your hard drive will improve performance by far greater amounts than a simple OS upgrade

[Darkness]

Well, all I can say ... my Lightwave machine has been running on XP x64 for quite a while and I recenlty switched my main machine to XP x64, too.

You won't want to play around with any kind of exotic hardware ... but I got my two systems (one's a C2D, the other's a dual DC-Opteron) running just fine. Just check if there's drivers for your stuff. Preferrably non-beta drivers ...

Performance wise ... I didn't do any benchmarks to compare LW in 32 and 64 bit. But it definately performs very nicely. Plus, the x64 system is the only one that has (so far) never crashed using Lightwave. In general the x64 systems behave very nicely... so I won't "downgrade" to a 32bit XP again, that's for sure.

[HawkMan]

I ran XP x64 for over a year with o realproblems, there's no reason not to upgrade really as all your 32 bit apps will perform the same.

There is of course the drivers issue. As such I would really rather suggest you go with some Vista flavour in 64 bit, it has much better hardware support than XPx64 had and as far as Vista go, all signed drivers in the future are pretty much required to be developed both for 64 ad 32, this isn't so for XP x64 wich hasn't seen as much driver developement.


for plugin reason I would suggest installing both 32 and 64 bit version of your 3D app for now though, but certain things like rendering will have an advantage on 64.

[JDR]

Originally Posted by HawkMan

There is of course the drivers issue. As such I would really rather suggest you go with some Vista flavour in 64 bit,

Whatever you do do NOT follow this advice. First, Vista's price is a total ripoff. Second, it is the slowest OS on the market - doesn't matter if its 64 or 32, it will be SLOW.

XP x64 is a vastly better option right now.

Seriously, Vista sucks llama balls. Great big hairy llama balls.

[Darkness]

Originally Posted by JDR

Whatever you do do NOT follow this advice. First, Vista's price is a total ripoff. Second, it is the slowest OS on the market - doesn't matter if its 64 or 32, it will be SLOW.

XP x64 is a vastly better option right now.

Seriously, Vista sucks llama balls. Great big hairy llama balls.

Well, buying the retail versions is stupid. The system builder versions are cheap enough, price is definately not a problem...

[spudmonkey]

Originally Posted by Darkness

Well, buying the retail versions is stupid. The system builder versions are cheap enough, price is definately not a problem...

I'm lucky enough to have two MSDN subscriptions, one of which is unlimited, so I don't really know how much an OS costs. OK, I have a rough idea, but still...!

XP 64 is definitely a better option than Vista 64, certainly until SP1 comes out for Vista and possibly beyond. Although Vista is due for some badly needed performance improvements and additional driver support in SP1, I suspect it will be like XP and not really be a solid platform until SP2 comes out

[HawkMan]

I upgraded from XP x64 to Vista, and no vista is NOT slower than XP. in fact UI wise Vista will be a lot faster than XP unless you'r stupid and turn off Aero.

The whole SP1 advise is just BS. YEah there's supposed to be performance increases in SP1, but Vista allready performs as well as XP. MAX performs as well, my games such as BF2, BF2142 and Vanguard all perfor as well as they do on XP, witht he latest drivers, BF is actually performing better than on XP.

there where a bug with file copying in Vista, wich a lot of the anti Vista club has been using to spread FUD that Vista is overall slower. Then there's the peope who claim Vista uses more resources, but fail to mention that this is with superfetch that actually USE your ram instead of havign it sit there and look pretty. Turn of superfetch (and if you run ultimate, other extra services you don't use such as server stuff) and you will see that Vista doesn't use more resources than XP. and both are capable of runign on 256, but I wouldn't reccomend that on either. but peopel are runing Vista on 512 just fine.


And how Vista is a ripoff I duno, I bought the ultimate OEM for my regular computer while my laptop came with Home Premium. for my regular computer I use the media center with my 360. Vista also coms with voice control that after testing I find to outperform Dragon Naturally speaking on both performanc and quality of recognizing speech. Bsides muliple other great added features such as instant search (not it's not comparable to Desktop search or any of the other non MS desktop search tools for XP, performance wise they can't have the integration that instant search have by talkign directly to the file system, and they certanly don't have the integration into the GUI).

I'd go on but I don't see a point as certain people just refuse to accept things, and are either in the never Vista or the SP1/SP2 camp and they're lie religius people you can show them proof and thye'll never believe.

Personally, I'm never moving back to XP. using an XP computer is like going back to the stoneage, and that's not because of visuals. and I do use my computers for heavy gaming and for 3D and 2D work, I wouldn't settle for something that ruins my perormance. HEck the fact that I can run Vanguard on this laptop with Vista pretty much disprives the whole performance issue.

[spudmonkey]

Originally Posted by HawkMan

I upgraded from XP x64 to Vista, and no vista is NOT slower than XP. in fact UI wise Vista will be a lot faster than XP unless you'r stupid and turn off Aero.

The whole SP1 advise is just BS. YEah there's supposed to be performance increases in SP1, but Vista allready performs as well as XP. MAX performs as well, my games such as BF2, BF2142 and Vanguard all perfor as well as they do on XP, witht he latest drivers, BF is actually performing better than on XP.

there where a bug with file copying in Vista, wich a lot of the anti Vista club has been using to spread FUD that Vista is overall slower. Then there's the peope who claim Vista uses more resources, but fail to mention that this is with superfetch that actually USE your ram instead of havign it sit there and look pretty. Turn of superfetch (and if you run ultimate, other extra services you don't use such as server stuff) and you will see that Vista doesn't use more resources than XP. and both are capable of runign on 256, but I wouldn't reccomend that on either. but peopel are runing Vista on 512 just fine.


And how Vista is a ripoff I duno, I bought the ultimate OEM for my regular computer while my laptop came with Home Premium. for my regular computer I use the media center with my 360. Vista also coms with voice control that after testing I find to outperform Dragon Naturally speaking on both performanc and quality of recognizing speech. Bsides muliple other great added features such as instant search (not it's not comparable to Desktop search or any of the other non MS desktop search tools for XP, performance wise they can't have the integration that instant search have by talkign directly to the file system, and they certanly don't have the integration into the GUI).

I'd go on but I don't see a point as certain people just refuse to accept things, and are either in the never Vista or the SP1/SP2 camp and they're lie religius people you can show them proof and thye'll never believe.

Personally, I'm never moving back to XP. using an XP computer is like going back to the stoneage, and that's not because of visuals. and I do use my computers for heavy gaming and for 3D and 2D work, I wouldn't settle for something that ruins my perormance. HEck the fact that I can run Vanguard on this laptop with Vista pretty much disprives the whole performance issue.

Woah! Calm down dude! I was merely making a point based on my experience as a professional software tester.

[Nadesico]

IF it helps. Look at it this way with 32 and 64 bit XP.

At the very worst, it will run as slow as XP 32 did, at the very best, it will run nearly twice as fast (notice the "nearly"). It depends on the application.

Of course, you have two further advantages here, first, there is very few 64 bit viruses around. Second, XP 64 uses the Windows SeErver 2003 Kernel instead of it's XP kernel, so it is much more stable then XP 32.