Gaming improvement going from 32-bit OS to 64-bit, excluding hardware changes?

[Sanhime]

Has anyone went from 32bit OS(Vista or otherwise) to 64-bit, and actually seen gaming performance improved? And doing so without significant hardware upgrades? I know some people will say their performance improved a lot, but thats only finding afterwards that they upgraded their rig at the same time.

I been testing out windows 7 RC, both 32-bit and 64-bit. I also have Vista 32bit install in mult-boot. So far I been just testing COD4/5 and Source games.

Seem like I get better frame rates with Win7 32-bit over Vista; in both OS, my framerates never average dip below 60 in crowded action (ie: 32 player servers). However, when I play the same games on Win7 64-bit, I lose anywhere from 15-30 average and minimum framerates in the same crowded action.

Should I just stick with 32-bit OS even though I have 4GB system?

*edit* I don't have Vista 64-bit, so I can't gauge with that.

BTW my specs are:
C2D E6600 @ 3.4Ghz
4GB ram
2 Geforce 8800 GTS (the old 640mb version) SLI
Always playing on 1080p

 

[newtekie1]

I haven't seen any improvements, but I haven't seen any performance loss either.

 

[Champ]

I did and I saw improvement in every way, although I did add 2 more Gigs. Call me crazy, but the games played faster (SupCom FA runs silkly smooth 8 players), textures and colors have more detail (FlatOut 2, UT3, and BurnOut Paradise), and my DX 10 gaming improved vastly (COH, everything Ultra/High and not a stutter and I can run Crysis at High around 30 FPS). Its the best move I ever made. Never going back 32.

 

[Cja123]

I run 64 bit on my desktop.. At one time I ran 8G total of system RAM.. I sold two sticks and now only run 4G of ram... to be honest, I saw little to no difference between 4G and 8G of RAM when it comes to games and things like that. I benched a lot and still, saw no notable difference. If you really want to improve your gaming experience.. get a good GPU. Your video card has way more influence on gaming than ram.

I would just stick with what you have... especially if you are seeing a decrease in performance from 32 bit to 64. 64 bit only helps if you wanna run anymore ram then 4 GB.

 

[Sanhime]

Does it have something to do with the way win7 64bit or 64bit in general handles memory? I thought 64bit is suppose handle memory more efficiently (especially win7) than 32bit.

Yea I knopw my video card is old, but still doesn't explain why I lose framerates on the games I mentioned.

 

[Cja123]

I'm no software guy so I can't effectively answer that for ya but I'm sure someone else here can . I just wanted to let ya in on my own experience. If you have tried 64 bit..and it wasn't any different than your 32 bit OS (Well in your case, your games performed worse in 64 bit), then I'd just stick with your 32 bit for now.. that's just what I would do though.

 

[hat]

Not much of a difference. Things load a little faster, a little more responsive... that's about it

 

[FordGT90Concept]

There's no difference...at least until 64-bit games become the norm.

 

[TheLaughingMan]

While I am not sure about this, I will take a stab.

Most, if not all, games out right now are 32 bit applications. A few of the games claim to be "optimized for 64-bit OS", but this is marketing BS which only means they added some extension code to reduce glitches, errors, and compatibility issues. As a result, performance of a game in a 64-bit OS is rather erratic. Your game could work better because of the better memory handling and 64-bit processor working in a 64-bit OS. Your game could lose performance because the extension code requires a little more overhead processing work. Or in Half-Life 2's case, the game will simply go bat shit crazy.

ALL games, even the memory hogs, will never use or need more than 2 GB of memory for itself for now at least. This is because they are engineered to work in Windows XP which has a application limit of 2 GB of RAM for a single process. As such, as the man said, more than 4 GB of RAM for gaming is pointless. The 8 GB will make Windows 7 a little snappier and give you bragging rights, but that is about it unless you are into video/photo editing.

 

[Sanhime]

Cool, thanks for thr responses. I tried reading around for info, and I came across this nice post, although I am tech-illiterate when it comes to this kind of subjects.

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=91260

 

[Sanhime]

I run 64 bit on my desktop.. At one time I ran 8G total of system RAM.. I sold two sticks and now only run 4G of ram... to be honest, I saw little to no difference between 4G and 8G of RAM when it comes to games and things like that. I benched a lot and still, saw no notable difference. If you really want to improve your gaming experience.. get a good GPU. Your video card has way more influence on gaming than ram.

I would just stick with what you have... especially if you are seeing a decrease in performance from 32 bit to 64. 64 bit only helps if you wanna run anymore ram then 4 GB.

And so the age old question: 285gtx or 295gtx?

 

[TheLaughingMan]

Good info.

Cool, thanks for thr responses. I tried reading around for info, and I came across this nice post, although I am tech-illiterate when it comes to this kind of subjects.

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=91260

That info is good to know, but wouldn't really apply to your situation unless the game you were running ran out of RAM and started using paging files. That would cause a drop in performance; however, this would work in reverse of your issue.

And 285, the performance gain is not work the $200 price difference. Hell I say get 2 GTX 260's in SLI. About the same as a 285, more performance, and less power during non-gaming situations.

 

[Champ]

I can't be the only that's seen big changes.

 

[Sanhime]

That info is good to know, but wouldn't really apply to your situation unless the game you were running ran out of RAM and started using paging files. That would cause a drop in performance; however, this would work in reverse of your issue.

And 285, the performance gain is not work the $200 price difference. Hell I say get 2 GTX 260's in SLI. About the same as a 285, more performance, and less power during non-gaming situations.

2 260 SLI uses less power than 1 285?

 

[Sanhime]

Maybe I'm seeing things, but the graphics on the game look shinier on 64.

 

[ShiBDiB]

I did and I saw improvement in every way, although I did add 2 more Gigs. Call me crazy, but the games played faster (SupCom FA runs silkly smooth 8 players), textures and colors have more detail (FlatOut 2, UT3, and BurnOut Paradise), and my DX 10 gaming improved vastly (COH, everything Ultra/High and not a stutter and I can run Crysis at High around 30 FPS). Its the best move I ever made. Never going back 32.

2 more gigs of ram.... thats ur improvement

 

[Cja123]

2 more gigs of ram.... thats ur improvement

 

[a_ump]

2 more gigs of ram.... thats ur improvement

haha no crap. going from 2gb ->4gb will give you a hella more responsive system in vista. and steppin up to a 64-bit system allowing yuo to use all 4gb especially will give u the boost you were talkin about.

 

[Papahyooie]

either stick with vista 64, or tough it out with xp 64 until 7x64 gets mature enough. I figure the reason is something in the way 7x64 handles some sort of issue. But vista (or even xp) x64 will be necessary with that 1280mb of video ram. Thats over a quarter of your usable ram in 32bit (plus with xp64 theres the whole "vram shadowing" in DX9 thats being debated) so i'd say go with vista64, as if im not mistaken it fixes the vram shadowing to only "used vram shadowing." Definitely need an x64 system though with those video cards.

EDIT: sorry im wrong about the 1280mb apparently the memory of both cards isnt used in sli, so still only 640 mb, someone correct me if i'm wrong?

 

[Mussels]

Has anyone went from 32bit OS(Vista or otherwise) to 64-bit, and actually seen gaming performance improved? And doing so without significant hardware upgrades? I know some people will say their performance improved a lot, but thats only finding afterwards that they upgraded their rig at the same time.

I been testing out windows 7 RC, both 32-bit and 64-bit. I also have Vista 32bit install in mult-boot. So far I been just testing COD4/5 and Source games.

Seem like I get better frame rates with Win7 32-bit over Vista; in both OS, my framerates never average dip below 60 in crowded action (ie: 32 player servers). However, when I play the same games on Win7 64-bit, I lose anywhere from 15-30 average and minimum framerates in the same crowded action.

Should I just stick with 32-bit OS even though I have 4GB system?

*edit* I don't have Vista 64-bit, so I can't gauge with that.

BTW my specs are:
C2D E6600 @ 3.4Ghz
4GB ram
2 Geforce 8800 GTS (the old 640mb version) SLI
Always playing on 1080p

There is a link in my sig which goes into detail about it.

Under a 32 bit OS, you have a 2GB address space limit per application. This includes video ram. If all your video ram was in use (ram doesnt add in SLI) then you would have 2048MB - 640MB. That leaves you with 1408MB of address space leftover for your game.

Many 32 bit games are 2GB+ aware, so that under a 64 bit OS this gets extended to the full 4GB. Games like supreme commander and stalker were patched to add this fix in, in order to prevent crashing. I even did the same to the sims3 in a thread here on TPU, allowing it to use more ram and thus not crashing on me anymore.

Since DX9 apps also duplicate video ram into system ram, its possible to lose another 640MB. That never really happens in reality, but it IS possible.

any FPS dips you're getting, would be caused by something else. Drivers, for example.

 

[Champ]

haha no crap. going from 2gb ->4gb will give you a hella more responsive system in vista. and steppin up to a 64-bit system allowing yuo to use all 4gb especially will give u the boost you were talkin about.

Well, I learned something new

 

[rampage]

There is a link in my sig which goes into detail about it.

Under a 32 bit OS, you have a 2GB address space limit per application. This includes video ram. If all your video ram was in use (ram doesnt add in SLI) then you would have 2048MB - 640MB. That leaves you with 1408MB of address space leftover for your game.

Many 32 bit games are 2GB+ aware, so that under a 64 bit OS this gets extended to the full 4GB. Games like supreme commander and stalker were patched to add this fix in, in order to prevent crashing. I even did the same to the sims3 in a thread here on TPU, allowing it to use more ram and thus not crashing on me anymore.

Since DX9 apps also duplicate video ram into system ram, its possible to lose another 640MB. That never really happens in reality, but it IS possible.

any FPS dips you're getting, would be caused by something else. Drivers, for example.

+ 1 that is the main reason for going to X64 (if you want more then 3 GB of usable ram and the system to use it a bit bette too), also when more X64 apps come out more main stream then there will be another major reason to use X64 OS

 

[devguy]

I can tell you that with Crysis Warhead, they recently released a 64bit patch for it. Now, my average framerates haven't changed much, but I can tell you that my minimum framerate has shot up about 5-10 fps on average. I can see that with 4GB ram, Warhead uses 2.1-2.3 GB Ram at very intensive parts, whereas with the 32bit version, it tries to use no more than 1.7GB Ram at any time.

But I too have had no reduction in performance from a 64bit OS.

 

[Mussels]

I can tell you that with Crysis Warhead, they recently released a 64bit patch for it. Now, my average framerates haven't changed much, but I can tell you that my minimum framerate has shot up about 5-10 fps on average. I can see that with 4GB ram, Warhead uses 2.1-2.3 GB Ram at very intensive parts, whereas with the 32bit version, it tries to use no more than 1.7GB Ram at any time.

But I too have had no reduction in performance from a 64bit OS.

devguy: its not a "tries to" - that last 300MB of ram was used by your video card. The minimum going up, is because there is less swapping going around, the system memory and video card are free to use as much as they need now, without fighting each other over the 2GB limit.

 

[TheLaughingMan]

When not gaming as stated

2 260 SLI uses less power than 1 285?

When you are not gaming it will just be one GTX 260 at idle, which comsumes less power. Only when the games are turned on when the spike of power use goes up.