Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1235
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
Windows XP 64-Bit Preview: First Look at Athlon 64 Performance
In case you
missed the news, Microsoft has just released a public preview of XP
64-bit. Microsoft officially calls the
new Operating System the "Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for 64-Bit
Extended Systems". The Customer
Preview can be downloaded for free or ordered on CD for a fee at the 64-bit
Edition website. The CDs will not
ship until mid-February, but the free 420MB download version is available NOW. We couldn't wait to download the preview of the
new OS and run an Athlon 64 through some benchmarks.
Your first task after downloading and
installing the OS will be finding drivers for some of the components in your
system. Microsoft's new 64-bit
Newsgroup is a great place to start your search. Drivers are part of the
new 64-bit OS, but they are still spotty in many cases. We needed to find a 64-bit driver for the
3Com LAN on our Asus SK8V and better video drivers. XP64 installed a driver for our Radeon 9800
PRO, but it was really basic and not much in the performance department. After we discovered ATI did not really have a
64-bit driver, but nVidia did have one on their web-site, we swapped in an Albatron
FX5950 Ultra video card. We also found
64-bit drivers for our 3Com on-board LAN and SK8V Sound at PlanetAMD64 and Collosumus. With the basic features taken care of we were
ready to take our first stab at testing 64-bit performance.
Windows XP 64-Bit Preview: Performance Test Configuration
|
Athlon64 FX51 Performance
Test Configuration |
|
|
Processor(s): |
AMD Athlon64 FX51 |
|
Operating
Systems: |
Windows XP 64-Bit Preview Edition Windows XP Professional, SP1 |
|
RAM: |
2 x 512MB Mushkin ECC Registered High Performance 2:3:2 #991125 |
|
Hard
Drive(s): |
Seagate 120GB 7200 RPM (8MB Buffer) |
|
Video
AGP & IDE Bus Master Drivers: |
VIA Hyperion BETA for XP64 (2/04/04) VIA Hyperion 4.51 (12/02/03) |
|
Video
Card(s): |
Albatron FX5950 Ultra 256MB |
|
Video
Drivers: |
nVidia WHQL 52.14 for Win XP64 nVidia WHQL 52.16 for XP |
|
Motherboards: |
Asus
SK8V (VIA K8T800) |
Since we
awarded Editor's
Choice to the Asus SK8V for top Socket 940 board, we decided to run all
benchmarks with the SK8V with Dual-Channel Registered Memory and the top-line
Athlon 64 FX51. The 3400+ runs at the
same real speed as the FX51, but uses Single-Channel unbuffered memory. We plan to take a closer look comparing the performance of the
3400+ and FX51 on XP64 in a future article.
Please forgive us for not including it here - but we wanted to get some
benchmarks to you as soon as possible.
Consider this a preview - with more to come.
System and Memory Benchmarks
SiSoft Sandra 2004 64-Bit
The 64-bit
version of Sandra 2004 has been available for a while, but we did not have an Operating System to reliably run with the 64-bit version. Sandra 64-bit runs fine on the XP64 preview.
While Sandra is a Synthetic Benchmark, we were curious to see if there
would be any performance difference in memory, CPU Arithmetic, and Multimedia
benchmarks between the 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Everything was kept the same; we even used
nVidia drivers close to the same version number. The only difference is Sandra 2004 tests were
run on XP Pro, while Sandra 2004 64-bit tests were run on XP 64-bit Preview
Edition.
|
SiSoft Sandra 2004 - Athlon 64 FX51 Performance |
|||
|
|
32-Bit (Windows XP SP1) |
64-Bit (XP64 Preview Edition) |
% Change 32 to 64-bit |
|
Sandra 2004 Standard Buffered |
INT
5722 FLT 5660 |
INT
5910 FLT 5831 |
+3.2% |
|
Sandra 2004 UNBuffered |
INT
2588 FLT
2682 |
INT
2811 FLT
2791 |
+6.3% |
|
Sandra 2004 CPU Arithmetic |
9161 mips 3470/4534 mflops |
10121 mips 3881/4105 mflops |
+10.5% mips -0.2% mflops |
|
Sandra 2004 CPU Multimedia |
INT 16404 FLOAT 21642 |
INT 16598 FLOAT 22869 |
+1% INT +5.7% FLOAT |
The 32-bit
vs. 64-bit results in Sandra are very interesting. Even in this pre-release version of XP64, the
Athlon 64 CPU and Memory Performance is higher than in 32-bit Windows XP. Mips, which is based on ALU tests, is more
than 10% faster, and Integer and Float tests in the Sandra 2004 Multimedia
benchmark is 1% to 6% faster. The only
area without increased performance in 64-bit is the mflops component of the
Arithmetic benchmark. If we look closer,
this benchmark is a combination FPU performance and iSSE2 performance. While Floating Point increases some 11.6% in
the move from XP to XP64 Preview, the Intel SSE2 results decrease by about the
same amount. The net result is
virtually no change in the composite mflops.
We do not know if this is because Intel SSE2 is penalized by 64-bit
operation or whether XP64 and/or Sandra 2004 64-bit benchmark require some
optimizations for 64-bit performance.
Super Pi
Super PI is
very simple - it calculates the value of pi.
In the benchmark you can select the number of placed for calculation,
and we used 2 million places as used in memory tests at AnandTech.
|
Super Pi - Athlon 64 FX51
Performance |
|||
|
|
32-Bit (Windows XP SP1) |
64-Bit (XP64 Preview Edition) |
% Change 32 to 64-bit |
|
Super Pi 2M Places |
88 seconds |
88 seconds |
0% |
As you can
see, Super Pi was exactly the same result in both 32 and 64-bit.
Media Encoding and Gaming
Benchmarks
Media Encoding
One area where Intel processors have enjoyed an
advantage over Athlon 64 is Media Encoding.
Many have expected that Media Encoding with 64-bit extensions would
erase that advantage. We ran the latest
XMPEG 5.0.3 with the latest DIVX codec 5.1.1 to compare encoding performance in
a common 2-pass setup.
|
Media Encoding - XMPEG 5.0
with DIVX 5.1. 1 |
|||
|
|
32-Bit (Windows XP SP1) |
64-Bit (XP64 Preview Edition) |
% Change 32 to 64-bit |
|
XMpeg 5.03/Divx 5.1.1 2-Pass |
58.7 fps |
67.8 fps |
+15.5% |
Keep in
mind that the software we used is not really written for 64-bit operation. Even so, we found 64-bit encoding to be 15.5%
faster than 32-bit. With 64-bit versions
of the encoding software we would expect even higher performance. Keep in mind that this is a preview version
of XP64, hampered by very early drivers, running an encoder optimized for
32-bit. It certainly appears that Media
Encoding under Windows XP64 will be a totally different animal.
Gaming
The Athlon
64 quickly distinguished itself as the Gaming CPU with its outstanding
performance in almost every 32-bit game.
With that kind of 32-bit advantage, we fully expected 64-bit gaming to
fly.
|
Game Performance - Athlon 64
FX51 |
|||
|
|
32-Bit (Windows XP SP1) Frames Per Second |
64-Bit (XP64 Preview) Frames Per Second |
% Change 32 to 64-bit |
|
Halo DX9.0b 1024x768 |
55.0 |
44.5 |
-19.1% |
|
Splinter Cell 1024x768 |
57.52 |
40.10 |
-30.3% |
|
X2 1024x768 |
135.9 |
130.1 |
-4.3% |
|
Quake 3 1024x768 |
482.0 |
235.0 |
-51.2 % |
|
Unreal Tournament 2003 - 1024x768 Flyby |
291.85 |
233.52 |
-19.0% |
|
Unreal Tournament 2003 - 1024x768 Botmatch |
112.46 |
88.21 |
-21.6% |
|
GunMetal 2 - Bench 2 DX9 1024x768 |
49.14 |
30.63 |
-37.7% |
|
GunMetal 2 - Bench 1 DX9 1024x768 |
39.93 |
26.50 |
-33.6% |
|
Comanche 4 1024x668 4AA |
71.24 |
52.35 |
-26.5% |
Gaming is
the one area in the preview that is a disappointment. As you can see, the standard benchmark games
under XP64 Preview were 4% to 51% slower than 32-bit, with the average speed
about 20% slower. It is far too early to
reach any conclusions in this area, but there is a lot of driver optimization
to be done to make up this kind of delta.
With the CPU and memory providing faster 64-bit performance, we have to
believe the drivers play a big part in this disappointing gaming performance.
Epic was
demonstrating UT 2004 64-bit at the release of the Athlon 64 last September,
and by all reports the performance was amazing. Perhaps we will only see the promised
advantage of 64-bit in games written or compiled for XP64. As we have already said, it is too early to
draw conclusions; We are only asking
questions. nVidia, ATI, Microsoft, and
chipset manufacturers really need to improve drivers to the point where 64-bit is at least on par with 32-bit when running 32-bit games. AMD
has argued all along the advantages of backwards compatibility with 32-bit
games. This will still be a 32-bit world
for a while and competitive gaming performance running 32-bit games is
extremely important. We fully expect
gaming to improve as we move toward the release of XP64. ATI has no published drivers for 64-bit, and
nVidia's release drivers now are nearly 3 months old. As we have seen over and over in the past,
drivers are what make the difference in games.
With the release of XP64 Preview we should now see ATI and nVidia making
giant strides in 64-bit graphics drivers.
Aquamark 3
would not run under XP64 preview, but the rest of our gaming benchmarks would
run. X2 has always had problems with
image tearing on nVidia cards and the image tearing is even worse in XP64, but the
benchmark does complete and provide believable results.
Content Creation and General Usage
To our complete surprise the Winstone 2004
benchmarks would not install under Windows XP 64-bit. Until these benchmarks are updated we cannot
run comparisons with XP64.
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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