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
Windows XP 64-Bit Preview: First Look at Athlon 64 Performance
In case you
missed the news, Microsoft has just released a public preview of XP
64-bit. Microsoft officially calls the
new Operating System the "Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for 64-Bit
Extended Systems". The Customer
Preview can be downloaded for free or ordered on CD for a fee at the 64-bit
Edition website. The CDs will not
ship until mid-February, but the free 420MB download version is available NOW. We couldn't wait to download the preview of the
new OS and run an Athlon 64 through some benchmarks.
Your first task after downloading and
installing the OS will be finding drivers for some of the components in your
system. Microsoft's new 64-bit
Newsgroup is a great place to start your search. Drivers are part of the
new 64-bit OS, but they are still spotty in many cases. We needed to find a 64-bit driver for the
3Com LAN on our Asus SK8V and better video drivers. XP64 installed a driver for our Radeon 9800
PRO, but it was really basic and not much in the performance department. After we discovered ATI did not really have a
64-bit driver, but nVidia did have one on their web-site, we swapped in an Albatron
FX5950 Ultra video card. We also found
64-bit drivers for our 3Com on-board LAN and SK8V Sound at PlanetAMD64 and Collosumus. With the basic features taken care of we were
ready to take our first stab at testing 64-bit performance.
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Staples - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
I really hope those game scores are due to premature video drivers. As you see, Halo did almost as well as the 32bit platform and as you should know, DX9 games are almost solely based on the GPU. So if Halo did almost as well on both platforms, it says that the video drivers can't be that premature, either that or explanation 2 is that we can expect a huge increase in DX9 games.Corsairpro - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
Too bad there weren't any decent video drivers. Every one who just glances at the numbers is going to claim "The message is clear x86-64 has failed" when it comes to games. Oh well, more supply for me to buy!buleyb - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
Not that I'm not excited, but you should point out Wes that this isn't just a 64bit OS, but an AMD 64bit OS, meaning that the performance improvement has a lot to do with the new general purpose registers and such. I don't want people thinking that 64bit is a pure performance improvement, because it really isn't by itself.But still, nice work :)
KristopherKubicki - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
Skol. Well done Wes.saechaka - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
boy am i glad i just bought this athlon 64 notebook. huurraaayy for meWesley Fink - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
There are times editing would be useful in this comments section. XP, and not Halo, had about the same performance.Wesley Fink - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
Halo was the game that was close to the same performance in XP and XP64, and not Halo as #4 pointed out. Since X2 is DirectX 8.1 with heavy use of transform and lighting effects, it has little relevance to the Halo performance. Corrected in the article.Emma - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
"It is very interesting that the DirectX 9 game Halo is already very close to 32-bit performance at only 4% slower than 32-bit performance. This means the newest 32-bit games, or at least the newest games from Microsoft, may be as fast on 64-bit as 32-bit at the launch of XP64, or possibly even faster."Can you clarify this please. The table shows there being a -19.1% change...
Boonesmi - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
by the way ive read in several threads of guys using pcmark 2004 and getting incredible fps in divx encodingEcmaster76 - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
Very interesting. That 15% increase in media encoding should have the AMD execs laughing maniacally. That might end up getting them a 15% increase in market share.