Being state of the art is best?

[Jo']

Would Windows XP be able to utilise your new hardware effectively, though? It may be time to move to the 21st century and start finding 64-bit editing programs that will run under Win7 x64 and (hopefully) allow you to work on much more complicated projects without running into these sorts of technical limitations?

Well, people say/write a lot though they know only little.

In my case I am just using A LOT of effect plug-ins. Hey, we talk about some 250 tracks and maybe about 40 effects that the application has to run in real-time. Win7 or 8 wont fix that. ACID could be a bit more clever about not using CPU power on not actively running tracks though. Or maybe it's the Plug-in makers faults since I gain about 20% CPU power by muting the scenes I am not working on. And as I said over clocking by 25-30% just gives the needed edge



I scouted the net for reliable system comparisons and it turns out that there are few real 64bit applications. Java e.g. shall not have a 64bit version (and as i read might never have any soon), which means Windows will always rely on this WOW64, a virtual 32bit environment for 32 bit applications on 64 bit platforms. Because 32bit programms DO NOT run on 64 bit environments! Let that one sink slowly. It's a technical thing of incompatibility I read and vaguely understand. The CPU would just handle the data bus width wrongly with 64 bit and the app would quickly crash.

Apart from that, just turning an application from 32 bit to 64 does not necessarly makes much sense or give any performance gain - perhaps actually the contrary. (some) Opcodes take up about twice as much memory. So I read programs get bloated by about 30%+ only by compiling them in 64 bit.

Apart from turing up the CPU clock, additional speed increase is gained only if an application can make reasonable use of the specialised registers and hardware supported data types. Pretty much the same thing like when I switched from 8 Bit C64 to 16bit Atari ST assembler or having a floating point co-processor.

I 1st handedly know the case of my friend who uses audio libraries for orchestral sounds. The 32bit version of ProTools (in fact any 32 bit application) is limited to 2 GB of RAM (independently of Windows7/8 or XP). Esp since he combines the libraries to have them all running at the same time for a song ProTools quickly runs out memory. He has to use a 64 bit helper application which kind of inter communicates wit Protools and handles the GBs of sound files.

According to Intel itself XP can handle the i7 CPUs from SP2 on. The other thing I mentioned are the huge TeraByte drives, which are limited to 2TB partitions under 32bit... which isn't really an issue for me though. Problem will be to get appropiate hardware drivers for XP since it's not supported any more.

In fact many benchmarks are non-real life artificial special cases. A comparison of a server hi-end i7-4960 I found last night is in fact slower at executing games than the i7-4770. Though the 4960 naturally excells at specific computation tasks. It also has a slightly higher clock rate *nudge*nudge*
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/proz ... im-test/5/

It appears to be reasonable for me to stick with the 4770k which IS very powerful. I estimate about 3 to 6 times faster than my system now. (dependent on tasks like video rendering, zipping, audio encoding etc)

In addition the whole dual channel thingy is reported on wikipedia to DESPITE theoretical 50% boost to in fact not giving more than about 5% - if one is lucky. In special cases it might(!) be better.

So yeah... so much for 'your' 21. century.

The real difference are just not made public enough for me to compare.

[Darkling]

tl;dr

Well, if the 2TB partition thing doesn't bother you, then by all means stick with 32-bit. I have Win7 x64 because the 32-bit version can't address more than 4GB of RAM (my current computer has 8GB), but I'm not sure how much of a performance gain I got out of the extra RAM. I probably got more of a speed increase from switching to a solid-state hard drive (SSD).

I haven't had any problems running 32-bit programs under Win7 x64, though. As you said, not many programs are written specifically for the 64-bit architecture. I think Adobe has separate 32- and 64-bit versions of Photoshop (and probably the other programs in its creative suite as well), but they're the exception rather than the rule. I moved up to 64-bit mostly to get around hardware limitations (ie the RAM issue), not because I thought 64-bit was the inevitable future of all software programming.

At this point, I think any improvement in your hardware will probably help with the performance of your audio mixing programs, so you should go with whatever you think is financially plausible for you.

[Jo']

8GB RAM I barely find offers for 2x2=4GB anymore. And when they cost as much as 8GB.

What do you need more than 4GB for?

[Darkling]

Nothing, apparently. It was just a number I thought sounded cool, and RAM was cheap at the time, so I figured why not. But I don't think I have any programs that benefit from having 8gb of RAM. =)

[Jo']

8GB of RAM FTW!

[Arch Evil]

Computers these days all have fancy quad cores or even more (multi-core processors?), but since there's practically no software out there that bothers to efficiently USE more than 1 processor, I think it's kinda pointless. I've played video games that 'required' a quad core processor (as a MINIMUM requirement even) on my old, 2008 dual-core processor, so for me, that's evidence enough that having a fancy quad core (or higher) is bs.

Same thing with RAM. If you have 8GB of RAM, it's kinda pointless if it's not DDR3 RAM :P

Alright, that's about as far as my computer 'knowledge' goes...

[Jo']

Some tasks cannot run in parallel threads. For that reason the new i7-core have a 'turbo'. Means if only one thread runs the clock goes up to e.g. 3,9GHz while it goes down to 3,6 if several cores are used.

On my Core Duo ACID was using up both cores to 100%. Overclocking by about 30% lowers the usage by ~15%.

Saying one needs a quad core I guess is just the game makers working hand in hand with the hardware makers. If everyone would stick with decent hardware for some 5 to 10 years, this profit based economy would quickly fail. What a waste of resources and intelligence.

[Darkling]

Yeah, I'm past the stage of my life where I had to keep up with the hardware race. It used to be that new games would come out every couple of years that would render my old graphics card obsolete, forcing me to upgrade just to get acceptable performance.

The game companies would seem to optimise their games for the cutting-edge high-end (ie expensive) graphics cards. Often I wouldn't be able to play a game at full visual quality until three or four years after I bought it, when the technology to run it had become cheap enough for me to include it in my latest PC.

I suppose that's one advantage of playing games on consoles - at least with those, the game developers know exactly what the technical specifications of the gamer's system are. Of course, then you get stupid situations where they try to port a game made for PS3 or Xbox 360 to an underpowered system like the Wii, using the same basic code. I think the Wii U will be left in the dust by the PS4 and the Xbone; the Wii U was built to be competitive with the current generation of consoles, not the new ones coming out this month.

[Arch Evil]

Nowadays, I think the graphics in games can't/won't become much better and more realistic than it's currently possible. At least the 'leaps' won't be as huge as they have been in the last decades. Likewise, hardware isn't likely to evolve in huge steps anymore either: CPU's are already as fast as they currently can get, that's why multiple cores is 'a thing' these days. So the hardware race may finally reach it's end for the time being (or at least be much slower than it used to be). Until they've invented the quantum computer, of course

I suppose that's one advantage of playing games on consoles

The downside? Game series... Want to play the next installment of (insert game here)? Better buy a (insert fancy new console or handheld)

[Jo']

After an investment of three full days I can say that much:

ACID7.0e does run on an i7-4770K Win7 64bit... generally. However with the plug-ins I use it performs WORSE(!) than on my overclocked core duo E8300.

I am slightly frustrated.

Additionally the Intel HD 4600 on-board graphics, though in theory more powerful than my Ati Radeon HD 5670 in my 'old' PC, refuses to offer more resolution for my VGA 19" CRT than 1280x1024. I have been using 1600x1200 for YEARS now.


I am very hesitant to switch to another DAW (digital audio workstation) since the ACID/Vegas GUI and handling appeals to me very much so.

Since ACID hasn't be updated by Sony in 5 years, I am considering using Vegas 12 pro (64bit). Both for video and audio works. However most audio plug-ins are 32bit. So my first tests made Vegas crash quickly.

I'll try Vegas 32bit next and then maybe Win7 32bit (for testing ACID anyway).

Nowadays, I think the graphics in games can't/won't become much better and more realistic than it's currently possible.

Problem is. Making a shooter is easier/cheaper than making an 'intelligent' game.

If commerce can't sell more and more, the system fails. If you ask me, it should (fail)! ASAP!