Should I install Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit? (Not solved)

[Tvangesti]

On my spare machine, I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit.
I'm looking to see if I'd get better gaming performance.

The specifications are:

[The Last Rydian]

In a general sense, no. Going from a 32 to 64-bit OS on windows will not make programs faster.

[Allariele]

Depends which software you intend to run, for now, most apps are written for 32 bit and won't make much difference. However, more are also supporting the 64bit architecture, a noticeable difference would be in heavy processing such as video-apps and scientific calculations, and of course the generic ability to address more than 4GB of RAM should you need it.

In relation to gaming, So far I believe only Crysis and Hellgate:London are written to be run in a native 64-bit environment. Standard 32-bit app will limit your virtual address space to 2GB, whereas 64bit allows 8TB. (Crysis's developers ran into a stability issue with the 32-bit level editor when it ran out of address space at ~1.7GB)

Quote:

Chuck Walbourn: x64-native games are pretty limited today, and most of them are "early-adopter" titles. We hear that there are a number of studios who use x64 native builds of the game internally for development, but the publishers don't want to pay for the costs of testing and supporting them right now. Once we get a point where developers and publishers do focus on making x64-native versions of games, there are some performance improvements that can be had with more registers, better SSE2 SIMD utilization, aggressive use of memory mapped I/O, and significantly larger assets. Right now the real point is to be able to get past the 2 GB squeeze before we see major performance wins from software optimization reappear.

So yes. The shift to 64-bit computing is happening but it isn't quite yet worth spending money upgrading your OS for it. Will it help games run faster? Hmm... probably not for programs designed for 32bit, seeing as the program would of been compiled for 32bit address space, then having to convert it...therefore it is actually slowned down. whereas games that are written for 64bit can fully utilise registers that can move 64bits of data a time :s

[The Last Rydian]

Of course, the bottleneck for games is rarely that, it's usually the video card, so in actual real-world tests on consumer hardware with consumer games, any speed increase at all is not even worth the formatting time. Not yet, at least.

[Dragon Alchemest]

im running windows 7 professional 64bit and im not seeing any differences in performance towards my old 32bit OS but Ultimate is not much different than professional

[Zappa Phan]

buzzy1113

WINDOWS SUCK

People who say this really don't know what their talking about. It's like saying Ashphalt sucks because you own a boat. Windows, Linux, OSX, ect all have their good points and bad points. Both have their place in the computer world.

Windows is good for gaming, has the most programs written for it, very user friendly and is backed by a multi-trillion dollar company. It's downsides are that it is prone to viruses and errors, but really if you know how to operate a computer correctly, this isn't really a downside(vista is still error prone regardless wink ).

Linus/OSX is good for actual computing. Writing programs, running servers, hacking, ect but it sucks for gaming and applications in general and isn't user friendly. One up side to Linux is that you can find programs to do just about anything for free.

It comes down to what you prefer to do on your computer tbh.

[x_Mr Snowman_x]

No, it's not really worth spending a couple hundred dollars for a 64 bit OS. You don't need 64 bit and it won't really up the PC peformance that much for gaming. Its best to stick to 32 bit now just for compatibility but soon we'll all shift to 64 bit.