In reply to a post by DavidFinbarr:

Did you try it in compatibility mode?

Tried that, but it is more of a driver problem than anything else and they have to be produced for 32 or 64 bit as far as I know.

Not too bothered, just a bit of a pain, I will get a new webcam at some point. The old webcam had a nice goose neck and some usb ports on which was useful, I expect newer webcams are better anyway.

Hi

I've edited the link, it was the full stop causing the invalid link, not hard to see and I'm sure you would have found the the article soon enough if it confirmed your thoughts

I'm quite happy for you to believe there are no significant advantages to 64-bit OSs. I have a 64-bit processor so I use a 64-bit OS. I certainly wouldn't recommend spending extra to buy a 64-bit processor if I had a 32-bit one.

Thank you, I'm quite happy for you to believe there is lol.

Regards

Phil

Hi

I better take this 64 bit version of windows 7 off my machine then, since it will be no good as I only got 2Gigs of ram.

You have just fallen for myth and marketing I'm afarid. If you only have 2GByte of RAM there is no advantage and only negatives to using a 64bit OS, for a start you will have less available memory as the 64bit OS and programs use more memory by the fact they are 64bit, see the Pros and Cons of the Wiki article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit

Still you can upgrade your memory to 4GByte or preferably greater to get a real benefit without re-installing and video editing will be much improved but as it stands 64bit and 2GByte of RAM is not ideal.

Regards

Phil

Edited by deleted (Sun 25-Oct-09 16:15:12)

In reply to a post by AnotherExPipex:

The one and probably only benefit with 64bit is it can access greater than 4 Gig of memory.

I'm afraid that's a very ignorant statement. Go and study the 64-bit programming model, the number of registers available, the more efficient instruction set, to get a better view of the advantages.

64bit programs and OS use more memory

Again, this shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the processor architecture.

I thought we had the conversation a few months ago .. with Philip saying the same old stuff....... If your a gamer and have a 1gb or more gfx card and have 2gb of memory in your system it is very wise to move over to x64 ..

Hi

I thought we had the conversation a few months ago .. with Philip saying the same old stuff.......

Or you arguing the same old stuff maybe?

If you have 1GByte of graphics and 2GByte of RAM there is no benefit moving to 64bit. 64bit will see the OS and programs using more memory and the processors cache is less effective as it now appears smaller, all things that will reduce performance.

If you don't understand that, fine, but at least try and be open minded and do a bit of research.

Regards

Phil

Having looked at your link I would say that you have overlooked the part where it mentions the chief advantage - one of the ones that I mentioned:

The main advantage to 64-bit versions of such applications is the ability to access more registers in the x86-64 architecture.

This is one of the main reasons for improved performance in 64-bit apps and, to a lesser extent, the OS itself. Having an extras 8 registers to play with allows applications to make far less memory accesses. This is where the main performance boost comes from. The enhanced instruction set also helps, but probably to a lesser extent. Once applications start accessing the multi-media registers the difference is even more marked. Multi-media is one of the more important application areas nowadays.

The memory usage is - apparently - a fair point. But it fails to take into account the fact that with all the extra registers far less RAM is needed for temporary storage. Certainly I notice no greater memory usage by 64-bit Windows (not that it matters - memory is dirt cheap nowadays). In particular, the cache will be freed up so there is probably more cache available in 64-bit mode than 32-bit.

These arguments would not hold sway if we were considering processors that differed only in the width of their registers; but with the x86_64 processors this is not the case.

Right got mass effect working, right click icon in games menu and run as administrator, now works fine.

Hi

This is one of the main reasons for improved performance in 64-bit apps and, to a lesser extent, the OS itself. Having an extras 8 registers to play with allows applications to make far less memory accesses

In which case please point us to a realworld benchmark that shows 64bit out performs 32bit just because it is 64bit?

Multi-media is one of the more important application areas nowadays.

Multi-media to most people is a few YouTube clips or downloading compressed MP3's, are you telling me YouTube is better running 64bit?

Unless you have huge datasets that would benefit from greater than 4GByte of memory currently there is no performance benefit with 64bit extensions to the x86 architecture. It's not as though these 64bit Intel/AMD processors are really 64bit CPUs is it, it's just an extension to the instruction with one main goal in mind, to enable greater than 4GByte of memory.

Regards

Phil

Hi

The memory usage is - apparently - a fair point. But it fails to take into account the fact that with all the extra registers far less RAM is needed for temporary storage. Certainly I notice no greater memory usage by 64-bit Windows (not that it matters - memory is dirt cheap nowadays). In particular, the cache will be freed up so there is probably more cache available in 64-bit mode than 32-bit.

These arguments would not hold sway if we were considering processors that differed only in the width of their registers; but with the x86_64 processors this is not the case.

So after all the arguing you are starting to agree with what I say.

As for cache freed up comment due to the extra registers, yea okay, if you say so

Regards

Phil