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
Final Words
It is really exciting to finally be able to run
benchmarks on an Athlon 64 on a 64-bit XP Operating System, even if Windows XP 64-bit is just a Customer Preview right now. When Anand attempted
to run 64-bit benchmarks during the Athlon 64 launch about 4 months ago, only
one of our 32-bit benchmarks would even run under XP64. Things have progressed quite a bit since
then. We now have a 64-bit version of
Sandra 2004, and all of our standard game benchmarks ran on XP64 except
Aquamark 3. While Winstone 2004 benches
would not install, we expect that will be fixed in the near future.
The actual performance under Windows XP 64-bit
Preview showed great promise, but it is still something of a mixed bag. We were impressed that the CPU, Floating
Point, and memory ALL showed performance improvement in XP64 compared to
regular XP. This promises that we will
eventually see the performance improvements in applications that is potentially
there in the move to 64-bit extensions.
We were also impressed with the 15%+ improvement in Media Encoding when
running the same 32-bit encoding program under XP and XP64. Performance of current 32-bit games under
SP64, however, was below expectations.
Anand's 64-bit
testing with Linux at launch showed we could expect a 10% to 20% increase
in performance with a 64-bit OS for the Athlon 64. Certainly we don't see anything in these
early tests that would change that expectation when running 64-bit programs
under Windows XP 64-bit. However, there
are still unanswered concerns about how current 32-bit software, in particular
games, will run on the release version of Windows XP 64-bit. Drivers and further optimizations will
certainly improve and possibly remove this 20% performance penalty in gaming. This is, after all, a preview version with
immature drivers and almost no graphics support. We have no doubt after this preview that
64-bit applications will run faster, but we really don't yet have an answer to
the question of how existing 32-bit games will run. We should have a better answer to this in the
next few months.
Microsoft's last major preview release was Windows
XP. One of the things that public
preview accomplished was to push manufacturers to quickly update their drivers
for the new Operating System. You will
be frustrated searching for drivers to get the best performance from XP64
Preview, but the release of the free Preview version will speed up that process considerably. Nothing seems to get action from
manufacturers faster than consumers screaming for driver updates. Perhaps that was Microsoft's plan, a very
clever one, to push manufacturers into completing work on 64-bit drivers for
the new Operating System.
If you enjoy the bleeding edge, then by all means
give the public preview of Windows XP 64-bit a whirl. We do suggest you use the caution of setting
it up on a separate drive or installing your current OS as a multi-boot with
XP64 preview. In general we are
impressed with the demonstrated potential of XP64, and we are anxious to see
how far drivers and updates will take performance of current 32-bit games.
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42 Comments
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Jeff7181 - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
Very nice. This is reminding me of the Windows 3.1 > Windows 95 switch.PrinceGaz - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
Just to add to what I said, it would be beneficial if AnandTech ran all CPU article game tests at 640x480 to reduce the impact of the graphics-card as past reviews have shown that some of them are gfx-card bound.PrinceGaz - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
Its clear from those results that uaing an Athlon 64 with a 64-bit O/S will certainly give considerable performance improvements with many applications and perform at least as well in everything else.Equally clear is that the poor gaming results in this test are caused by immature/unoptimised AGP GART chipset and/or graphics-card drivers as all the other tests which weren't dependent on what was sent to the graphics-card showed the A64 doing at least as well as in 32-bit mode and usually somewhat better. Changing from 32-bit to 64-bit mode obviously isn't going to hamper the transfer of data down the AGP/PCI-Express bus (quite the opposite with suitable drivers) so I'd expect games to show similar performance gains to other apps once the drivers are mature.
INTC - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
Here is a description of the different modes of AMD64 operations:http://www.lostcircuits.com/cpu/amd_a64fx51/7.shtm...
It looks like WOW is okay but until applications are recompiled for full 64-bit the advantages are absent and there may even be some penalty for "Compatibility" mode as seen in the gaming scores.
It will be interesting to see what Intel will have at IDF in a few weeks.
Pumpkinierre - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
This OS has been written for the a64 which from memory has 3 modes of operation: full64bit, 32bit emulation and something in between. You mention DX-32bit(post #13) so can this OS run in 32bit mode. If so, you could run the games benchmarks using 32bit drivers and Win64. If scores were still the same then the OS would be to blame not the drivers.Still, good to see movement on the 64bit front. I suspect that Intel's recent announcements have something to do with this. Perhaps Win64 is not coded for A64 alone. Nevertheless, it cant but help a64 sales.
tolgae - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
Well, nobody seems to mention the fact that many of these apps (games especially) are running under WOW64. It is normal that such losses are happening. The CPU can run 32-bit natively very well, but now applications are going through this extra layer (being "converted" on the fly, in a sense) so that they can run on 64-bit OS. As with everything else about the Windows XP 64-bit, I am sure this will be optimized until the product ships (even after that).mattsaccount - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
The important thing to keep in mind is that this is not the final release of Windows 64 bit, unlike Prescott :) Nobody would use this BETA OS in a production environment.The way I interpret these results is like so. The improvements are real and will still be present when Windows 64 final (whatever it's called) is shipped. The applications with poor performance (i.e. games) will probably improve by the time the OS ships and we should therefore withhold judgement.
raskren - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
Wow what a hit in the gaming department! I expected to a see a modest gain in everything, but the tiny boost in 64bit apps and the huge loss in games makes the Prescott look a lot better.Wesley Fink - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
Splinter Cell has been added to the Game Benchmark comparison.XP64 uses DirectX 64 and a Direct X 32-bit version. We were told there may be a problem with enabling DirectX 64 in this Preview Edition. We did run DXDiag for 64-bits and checked to make sure DX64 was enabled. We then reran several game benchmarks and got essentially the same results as those posted in this review.
We will be on the lookout for updated graphics drivers and will report what we find.
klah - Saturday, February 7, 2004 - link
The Nvidia driver is still very slow and buggy. OpenGL actually runs faster in software mode with this driver.http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000257