64bit slower than 32bit !?

[Charles Pegge]

Are 64-bit Binaries Really Slower than 32-bit Binaries?


Can this really be true or is it an urban myth? Look at those benchmarks...

http://www.osnews.com/story/5768

[Petr Schreiber]

In some of the tests there has been quite a observable difference.

What is your real-life observation of 32bit vs. 64bit performance Charles?


Petr

[Charles Pegge]

I have yet to find out, Petr. But I reckon that 64bit can make a significant difference at the OS level where the lowest level functions can make use of the extra registers as local variables, saving memory read/writes. However for general programming the speed benefit is going to be insignificant when compared with all the other technical innovations.

[KIH999]

Outdated article.. (Thu 22nd Jan 2004)
Will guess that something have evolved the last 5-6 years..

[kryton9]

I see a substantial difference when running win64 on the same computer I ran win32 on.
This is my gaming computer and in the new games there is a noticeable improvement, like Unreal Tournament 3, Company of Heroes, Crysis.

Photoshop runs much nicer too.

[Charles Pegge]

I've found some more recent benchmarking articles:

32bit versus 64bit performance

2006 VISTA ~+10%

http://64-bit-computers.com/windows-...benchmark.html


2008 VISTA

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2280808,00.asp


2009 UBUNTU 9 ~+5 to +10%

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/ubun...bit-benchmarks

You can see from the bar charts that general performance gains are quite small.