X-bit labs

Windows XP Professional x64 Edition Preview: AMD64 and Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology (page 7)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 02/08/2005 | 02:16 PM ]

Now let’s see how the situation will look in gaming applications involving 3D power of the graphics subsystem. The earlier beta-versions of Windows XP Professional x64 Edition demonstrated very low performance in this case. At that time we considered raw drivers to be responsible for this low performance level. Now that quite a lot of time has already passed and RC1 operating system appeared, these problems should no longer be there. Let’s find out if this supposition is true:

The performance of 64-bit processors in 32-bit games run from the 64-bit version of the system OS proved to be quite acceptable. No doubt the 64-bit versions of the graphics card drivers have been significantly improved since the last time we worked with them. So, now the performance of our systems in 3D applications in Windows XP Professional x64 Edition is comparable with what we see in the same tasks in a regular 32-bit OS.

However, I would still like to stress that the performance of the tested Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 processors in the 64-bit Windows version is somewhat lower than the results obtained in 32-bit operating system. Although, this performance difference doesn’t exceed 5% that is why I decided to disregard it for now.