Windows XP Professional x64 Edition from a Hardware Perspective - True 64 Bit

Now we will see some applications that have been recompiled for 64-bit. I will test them against the 32-bit versions.

These results are from Sandra 2005 Lite. There are noticable gains in most areas, and are a nice bump. These results are an average of half a dozen runs. The very first time I ran the 64-bit tests the results were quite high compared to these averages. In the following runs, the results were within 1% of each other.

POV-Ray is a rendering program. The results are from the benchmark picture in 800 x 600 and no AA. As you can see 64-bit version gives much improvement over the 32-bit. These results would be very similar to those of movie rendering. This is why the newest Star Wars was rendered on AMD A64's and XP x64. They even used the beta version of XP x64. If the beta version has stable enough for a blockbuster movie like Star Wars to be rendered with, I'm sure that the final version should be stable enough for day to day use.

Far-Cry

Far-Cry recently got a patch to support 64-bit, so I will run both versions on XP x64. This will give us a better glimpse of what 64-bit can do for gaming.

The 64-bit version gained a few FPS more than the 32-bit version. I wouldn’t really call Far Cry a "true" 64-bit game since the new version is just a massive patch to the 32-bit game. The patch is over 500 MB and takes a while to install, but the improvements are well worth it.

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