CoX on 64-bit XP?

Hey all,

Before I rebuild my system, I was curious if anyone had any issues running CoX on the 64-bit version of Windows XP. I've done some searching, and all I can see are threads [censored] about the 64-bit version of Vista (actually [censored] about Vista in general, but let's leave that can of worms closed).

Thanks!

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50s: Doc Sharpe (C:I/K), Malan Bloyth (S:BS/Sh), December Blue (T:I/I), Michael X (Mm:R/T), Ultraboy (C:R/K), Zzyxx (Night Widow), plus 4 retired/rerolled

[b]Heard on Teamspeak:[/b]
"First of all, take off your mother's fishnets"
"Zzzzz."

Usually I advice people to not bother with xp 64. For the most part it has had horrible driver support. So it might not be worth it to install. Vista and windows 7 on the other hand have had better driver support. I know you might have read some negative things on vista, but most of that comes from the following: Word of mouth of someone else's bad experience, person has vista loaded on a pc thats really under the specs, person has a crappy video card (shakes fist at 6150LE onboard video), person doesnt know how to install drivers properly, person doesnt know how to configure the OS. I will say this I have had very few if any vista issues. I can say with confidence that I have probably installed vista more times than anyone who comes to this message board because I have done a full rollout of vista at my work place. Just about all my users have vista now. The only thing that I can think of is the driver crashing issue but that got fixed with service pack 2. The driver issues wasnt really a vista issue but an nvidia one, its just that nvidia refused to fix it on their end so microsoft patched it instead. All I can say is dont believe the vista haters who dont know what they are doing. If you are still worried about vista why not just get windows 7 64 bit instead? It comes out for purchase for users sometime in october. It was released to manufacturers yesterday, and will be available on MSDN/Technet on August 6th. Windows 7 has the ability to run a virtualized version of xp from within the operating system. That version of xp wont run 3-d games but it will run those older applications that might not run in windows 7. You just have to make sure you have the right proccessor for it. I have run windows 7 and vista, and CoX run perfect on my system. So its worth a try.

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I concur. I enjoyed Vista x64 on my gaming rig for about a year, and earlier this month moved to Windows 7 x64. It is smooooooooth.

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NightShift for Life.

I've actually had some experience running Vista myself (ran fine for me!), and have been running Windows 7 on my laptop since the initial beta (CoX ran fine on the initial beta, but doesn't run well on the RC, which is likely a driver issue). I'll likely switch to Windows 7 as soon as I confirm driver availability for what I consider to be critical.

Not a Vista hater myself, just not really interested in trying to eliminate the ignorance people have about it.


My goal, though, is to find out if people who are running 64-bit XP have had issues. Since I'm rebuilding the system anyways, I might as well upgrade the 3G of RAM I have with the 4G I have on the shelf.

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50s: Doc Sharpe (C:I/K), Malan Bloyth (S:BS/Sh), December Blue (T:I/I), Michael X (Mm:R/T), Ultraboy (C:R/K), Zzyxx (Night Widow), plus 4 retired/rerolled

[b]Heard on Teamspeak:[/b]
"First of all, take off your mother's fishnets"
"Zzzzz."

Gotcha. I think the biggest issue with XP x64 is the driver support, so if you can get that all ironed out, I see no reason why CoX wouldn't run on it fine. If you try it, let us know how it worked out.

I did actually have one problem with Windows 7 and CoX for a while. Turned out that when I kicked off my video card driver install and walked away, Windows Update decided my system needed to restart. So I was playing with my drivers half-installed... explained why a GTX 275 was getting 15fps in the game. Good stuff.

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Victory: @Brimstone Bruce
Brimstone Bruce (lvl50 Stone/Fire Tanker) Broadside Bruce (lvl50 Shield/WM Tanker)
Ultionis (lvl50 Dark/Dark Defender) Cortex Crusher (lvl50 Mind/Kin Controller)
Patronox (lvl50 Kat/Dark Scrapper) Harbinger Mk.7 (lvl50 Bots/FF MM)
NightShift for Life.

I'm having no problems with running CoX on the RC for Windows 7 64-bit. I did have to update my driver as the one Win7 loaded looked fine for everything but wouldn't run CoH at all.

Everything we've tried here in my school district with XP 64-bit met with disaster due to lack of driver support. Using the same hardware on many of the systems that had trouble with XP64 we've had no trouble with Vista64, and often the drivers are already loaded in Windows for the printers. These are the same printers we couldn't find reliable drivers for in XP64.

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If the game spit out 20 dollar bills people would complain that they weren't sequentially numbered. If they were sequentially numbered people would complain that they weren't random enough.

Black Pebble is my new hero.

I've been running CoX on XP-64 for a couple years now. Absolutely no issues... given that I selected my components for the build based on whether or not there were XP-64 drivers.

-Wolf sends

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That is the ONLY way I would ever install XP64 on a system.

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If the game spit out 20 dollar bills people would complain that they weren't sequentially numbered. If they were sequentially numbered people would complain that they weren't random enough.

Black Pebble is my new hero.

IIRC XP-64 is based on Windows Server and *not* XP-32, hence why there is no SP3 for it and things don't always work as expected.

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Have CoX running on one of my systems XP 64bit with SP3 and have had no issues. Two systems were built last month each with an different OS on them.

BOTH:

AM3 Gigabyte MA770 mobo
AMD Phenom X2 3.1gHz AM3 (all 4 cores opened, yay!)
XFX ATI 4850HD
8 gigs ram

(1)XP 64bit SP3
(2)Windows7 RC 7600

For what it's worth, I also run CoX on my laptop and it has Vista 64bit Ultimate which I tweaked.

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[ QUOTE ]
Have CoX running on one of my systems XP 64bit with SP3 and have had no issues. Two systems were built last month each with an different OS on them.

BOTH:

AM3 Gigabyte MA770 mobo
AMD Phenom X2 3.1gHz AM3 (all 4 cores opened, yay!)
XFX ATI 4850HD
8 gigs ram

(1)XP 64bit SP3
(2)Windows7 RC 7600

For what it's worth, I also run CoX on my laptop and it has Vista 64bit Ultimate which I tweaked.

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There is no SP3 for 64-bit XP. It uses the Windows Server kernel, not the XP kernel.

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hmmmmm..you're correct. I believe the version I got had some of the updates from SP3 x86 were slip-streamed into the 64bit ISO (according to what I read) but it must have been updated with SP2 when Windows Server 2003 was released too. Oh well, it works!! LOL

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Yeah, most of what's in SP3 for 32-bit XP is in SP2 for Windows Server and 64-bit XP. The remainder are available as separate downloads from Windows Update. You're not missing out on anything.

I only mentioned it to note that, theoretically, XP32 and XP64 aren't really the same OS.

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My goal, though, is to find out if people who are running 64-bit XP have had issues. Since I'm rebuilding the system anyways, I might as well upgrade the 3G of RAM I have with the 4G I have on the shelf.

[/ QUOTE ]Just a heads up: Most motherboards don't support more than 4G of ram (not counting the more recent ones). And also, even with more than 4 gigs of ram in the machine, CoX still won't be able to use more than the 32bit architectural limit.

Unless you're planning on running multiple instances of CoX at once, or CoX and other massive applications at the same time (like Firefox ), you likely won't see much benefit from switching to 64bits (at least w.r.t. CoX- 64bit video encoding and encryption software is far faster on 64bit systems).

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I've been running XP-64 for almost 3 years. While there were driver problems early on, there really aren't any now.

Torqumada

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For the most part it has had horrible driver support. So it might not be worth it to install. Vista and windows 7 on the other hand have had better driver support.

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I had to lol at that. Vista had amazingly bad driver support for a long time after its launch, and how are you basing the driver support for an OS that is still in beta and not even released to the public yet?

I love how you say "don't believe the vista haters" then go on to list several examples of just how screwed up an OS it was for a long time. Vista may not be the crap it was during the first year of its release, but it is still far from being as stable and reliable as XP. Vista has more bloat, much higher system requirements to run said bloat, and really no improvements other than some much needed improved network security options that will really only effect the business end.

My opinion is that if you have a computer than can't run Windows Vista already, it's not likely going to run Windows 7 that well, *some* Atom netbooks notwithstanding (I would completely rule out running it on any of the Z-series Atom's - I know - I've tried - it's ugly). Windows Vista users with SP2 (everybody should be on that already) won't notice a big performance increase on an average machine. Are the features worth spending that much on an upgrade if you already own Windows Vista? Honestly, I don't think so. If your computer can't run Windows Vista that well, Windows 7 isn't going to be some kind of miracle-maker either.

My advice is to buy a new system that includes it. Most customers probably will anyway. Netbooks that can't run Windows Vista well will still be better suited to Windows 7 Starter, and new netbooks will ship with the new Atom dual-core mobile chips later this year anyway, which is going to be a much better experience with multimedia on Home Premium (HD video isn't workable on existing GMA 950-based machines).

So to sum up:

Is Windows 7 good? YES

Is it better than Vista? YES

Is it vastly superior to Vista? IMHO NO, but YMMV. There are unique features that Vista doesn't have that certain folks will like (such as XP Mode) - I like the new deployment refinements

Is it worth the upgrade for Windows Vista users? IMHO, not really, unless you can get some kind of deal on the upgrade

Is it worth the upgrade for XP users? YES, but only if your computer is at least Vista Premium compliant but you've been holding out on Vista

Will it improve your systems performance? NO

Will it run on netbooks? YES

Will it run faster than Vista? Only on Atom-based netbooks because Vista wasn't optimized for them and XP has much lower requirements than Vista. On mainstream systems, NO, although UI animations have been sped up from Vista so it'll seem faster to move around. There are shortcuts to certain areas (like wireless network connections) that weren't present in Vista, so that may be "faster" from a workflow perspective.

Will it run well on all netbooks? IMHO, only N series Atom netbooks

Should I wait and just replace my aging computer instead of upgrading it to Windows 7? IMHO if you have an XP-era computer, YES - you'll have a much better experience that way

Should you wait to buy a computer until after Windows 7 ships? NO, unless you want a netbook (see my above note - it's more for the hardware than the software). MAKE SURE the system includes the free Windows 7 Upgrade Option though.

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Will it improve your systems performance? NO

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If this is in reference to XP 64bit over Windows7 64 bit I would have to disagree somewhat.

XP 64bit just doesn't have the proper architecture to handle todays 64bit processors efficiently. Maybe performance is considered better due to the lower overhead requirements of the OS. If you know how to tweak and turn off all the glizt and glamour of Vista or Windows7 they run very well.

These debates are similar to the vinyl/cd debates way back when and even today. One is an older technology with followers that swear it's so much better sounding where as the latter is new technology and more efficient and better sounding.

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Will it improve your systems performance? NO

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If this is in reference to XP 64bit over Windows7 64 bit I would have to disagree somewhat.

XP 64bit just doesn't have the proper architecture to handle todays 64bit processors efficiently. Maybe performance is considered better due to the lower overhead requirements of the OS. If you know how to tweak and turn off all the glizt and glamour of Vista or Windows7 they run very well.

These debates are similar to the vinyl/cd debates way back when and even today. One is an older technology with followers that swear it's so much better sounding where as the latter is new technology and more efficient and better sounding.



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Proper architecture? Provide a reference or something, XP64 benchmarks very well against anything out there, in the most general terms its faster than Vista and slower than Windows7. On top of that the trickle down of drivers from Vista has been great, there is fantastic support for XP64 driver wise right now.

Its also interesting kernel technology wise to note that XP (all variants) has shown to be faster running heavily multithreaded apps on current 2 and 4 core CPUs than Vista or Windows 7 as those kernels have been optimized for maybe 8 but certainly 16 cores in the future, and at that point they both run away from XP in performance.

Its faster because the code is in relative terms much much smaller/tighter than either of the 2 newer OS.

Sidetrack:
64bit is not inherently faster than 32bit (with caveats, AMD cpus can use more registers in 64 mode, if your app has a 64 version and will use more than 2GB memory itself, etc etc) , the primary reason to use 64bit is the HUGE address space. In fact 64bit versions of some programs will be slower than 32bit because the dwords etc are twice as large reading and writing to memory.

For your average desktop today, there are only a handful of programs that could possibly use more than 2GB of memory, gaming could be one of them, but I am unaware of any game that uses more than 2GB at this time, video/image editing perhaps.

Server side I use 64bit for VMWare, SQL Server, Exchange Server.

I even have 1 8GB physical VM system running 32bit Linux in PAE mode and i'm very happy with that, its almost too bad that MS had to tie DEP mode with PAE on XP instead of increased memory use, that system benchmarks very well against a similar one running 64bit.

64bit client side I have people running Solidworks/Maya/3DS, I have 1 solidworks user with a model that is 3GB in memory to start, plus edits plus undo etc etc.

This game peaks at about 1.3GB of memory use for example, 64bit offers CO* nothing at this time.

In a nutshell, if you are using regular desktop apps don't expect 64bit to offer you anything special over 32bit at this time, so don't feel like you are missing out or something and if 'things' change you can always reinstall/upgrade later.

And finally all that being said I have 64bit Windows 7 running on a 4 core 8GB system right now and I think Microsoft has a hit.

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Sorry, my statement was ment to get into a pissing match =)

Windows XP is old technology plain and simple. Does old technology work? Yes, of course. But, if you want to future proof yourself a bit more get the upgrade OS.

Having a 64bit OS allows you to increase your ram size and I have to disagree withthat not being a very viable option. I agree that this game and other aps may not use 2gigs of ram but don't forget we are talking cumlative here. Have a bunch of programs running at the same time and that 2-4 gigs of ram gets used up pretty quick and your only option to increase it is to have an 64bit OS running.

Also [referencing the 32bit or 64bit comment], not many apps use all the cores in multicore CPU I agree but, if you REALLY want to get into tweaking your system out for the use of cores you can set the affinity of certain programs to use certain cores and free up others.

For example, you could theoretically set most programs to use the first 3 cores of a quad 3gHz and set CoH to use the forth core.... that would dedicate most all of the 3gHz of the forth core to CoH!

If you spend the time tweaking Vista or Windows7 turning off features you will never need, tweak the Services.msc, tweak the gpedit.msc and tweak the Task Scheduler; they run great.
Like I said vinyl LP and cd lovers =) We are both right in our own ways, it's all up to personal preference. Just FYI, I have XP Pro 64bit, Vista Ultimate 64bit and Windows7 RC 7100 on three different systems and I will more than likely upgrade to Windows7.

But I digress, the OP is fine using XP64 bit in their new system for use with CoH and perform most all of the same options I just said above.

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[ QUOTE ]
Sorry, my statement was ment to get into a pissing match =)

Windows XP is old technology plain and simple. Does old technology work? Yes, of course. But, if you want to future proof yourself a bit more get the upgrade OS.

Having a 64bit OS allows you to increase your ram size and I have to disagree withthat not being a very viable option. I agree that this game and other aps may not use 2gigs of ram but don't forget we are talking cumlative here. Have a bunch of programs running at the same time and that 2-4 gigs of ram gets used up pretty quick and your only option to increase it is to have an 64bit OS running.

Also [referencing the 32bit or 64bit comment], not many apps use all the cores in multicore CPU I agree but, if you REALLY want to get into tweaking your system out for the use of cores you can set the affinity of certain programs to use certain cores and free up others.

For example, you could theoretically set most programs to use the first 3 cores of a quad 3gHz and set CoH to use the forth core.... that would dedicate most all of the 3gHz of the forth core to CoH!

If you spend the time tweaking Vista or Windows7 turning off features you will never need, tweak the Services.msc, tweak the gpedit.msc and tweak the Task Scheduler; they run great.
Like I said vinyl LP and cd lovers =) We are both right in our own ways, it's all up to personal preference. Just FYI, I have XP Pro 64bit, Vista Ultimate 64bit and Windows7 RC 7600 on three different systems and I will more than likely upgrade to Windows7.

But I digress, the OP is fine using XP64 bit in their new system for use with CoH and perform most all of the same options I just said above.

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Any performance gains from tweaking Windows have seriously diminished since Windows 2000, the only notable exception is possibly Aero, otherwise there isn't much to be gained by disabling the WirelessZeroConfig for example, yes there are some 3rd party addons that can be good to disable.

I'm not here to stop anyone from upgrading to Win7-64, I will recommend vehemently against anyone 'upgrading' to Vista especially with the short timeline now to Win7.

I just want people to be informed about the choices they are making.

64bit doesn't offer anyone anything unless they have an application that is going to use more than 2GB itself, or multiple apps that will genuinely consume more than ~3.0GB. My assumptions for this statement are that they already have a computer with 32bit OS and 2-4GB physical installed depending on the instance above.

If you are playing CO* and you have 32bit with 2GB installed there isn't much performance to be gained by going to 4GB, the benchmark differences are puny/insignificant.

Maybe you consider an upgrade if you want to run multiple sessions, maybe there are a handful of other exceptions, but I doubt that they apply to more than 5% of the general computer users including gamers.

Again, if someone wants to get 64bit XP or Win7 then great, just don't think that its going to make your game of Solitaire or Email or web browsing faster.

Same thing with future proofing, computers are very inexpensive now, use what you have for as long as it does what you need then upgrade to whatever the next best thing is.

Quite frankly there are no line item features in Vista or Win7 that interest me in the least, the only one that had promise was axed in 2006 after the rewrite of Vista.

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64bit doesn't offer anyone anything unless they have an application that is going to use more than 2GB itself, or multiple apps that will genuinely consume more than ~3.0GB.

[/ QUOTE ]Computationally heavy applications (such as encryption and video encoding) will also benefit massively from moving to 64bits (assuming the algorithms are also optimized for 64bits), both because of it being 64bits, as well as x86_64 having additional registers and a few other nice improvements. But yeah, for the vast majority of applications it won't make them faster, and it may even make them slower due to 64bit pointers and the like (which'll cause an increase in cache misses).



(moving to 64bits is still good for the long run, even if in many ways it doesn't help too much in the short run... just like how going multicore only benefited home users in a few situations when they first started coming out, but now more and more software is being designed to take advantage of the the extra cores)

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64bit doesn't offer anyone anything unless they have an application that is going to use more than 2GB itself, or multiple apps that will genuinely consume more than ~3.0GB.

[/ QUOTE ]Computationally heavy applications (such as encryption and video encoding) will also benefit massively from moving to 64bits (assuming the algorithms are also optimized for 64bits), both because of it being 64bits, as well as x86_64 having additional registers and a few other nice improvements. But yeah, for the vast majority of applications it won't make them faster, and it may even make them slower due to 64bit pointers and the like (which'll cause an increase in cache misses).

(moving to 64bits is still good for the long run, even if in many ways it doesn't help too much in the short run... just like how going multicore only benefited home users in a few situations when they first started coming out, but now more and more software is being designed to take advantage of the the extra cores)

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I agree, but even in those cases unless you are doing that all day long for your job its no big deal if your 1 time encryption/compression/encoding takes 7 minutes instead of 5 or visa versa.

But I completely agree that 64bit is the future, 'everyone' will be on a 64bit OS, I wouldn't be surprised though if in 5 years many/most of them are Linux or Mac though

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64bit doesn't offer anyone anything unless they have an application that is going to use more than 2GB itself, or multiple apps that will genuinely consume more than ~3.0GB.

[/ QUOTE ]Computationally heavy applications (such as encryption and video encoding) will also benefit massively from moving to 64bits (assuming the algorithms are also optimized for 64bits), both because of it being 64bits, as well as x86_64 having additional registers and a few other nice improvements. But yeah, for the vast majority of applications it won't make them faster, and it may even make them slower due to 64bit pointers and the like (which'll cause an increase in cache misses).

(moving to 64bits is still good for the long run, even if in many ways it doesn't help too much in the short run... just like how going multicore only benefited home users in a few situations when they first started coming out, but now more and more software is being designed to take advantage of the the extra cores)

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I agree, but even in those cases unless you are doing that all day long for your job its no big deal if your 1 time encryption/compression/encoding takes 7 minutes instead of 5 or visa versa.

But I completely agree that 64bit is the future, 'everyone' will be on a 64bit OS, I wouldn't be surprised though if in 5 years many/most of them are Linux or Mac though

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heh, Mac or Linux will NEVER be main stream. Linux would have a chance if it dumbed itself down so much that it acted just like windows, but then it wouldnt be linux anymore. The average mass market computer user is not interested in actually having to learn how to use command lines, etc. they just want to "click and go."

Apple doesn't have the ability to ever surpass Windows. Their costs are too high, and their hardware costs more than it is worth.

All this combined with the fact that nearly the entire industry is built around microsoft operating systems and its supporting software.

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I disagree, I have seen fantastic penetrations into the business market of Linux installations.

For example I recently replaced a $100,000 plus support vertical market CRM product with a completely free web based GPL package, where the complete costs were $1000 consulting and the hardware which they would buy anyways.

Windows used to be 5% of a computers cost now its approaching 25% as MS has refused to lower their cost to OEMS.

Its hard to find an OEM now that does not offer some kind of factory Linux installation or bare bones PC.

I think the marketplace is poised to leapfrog MS and the other old institutions, 5 maybe 10 years at most.

I think that for the average user Cloud computing and becoming untied from a particular OS will be the future (why pay $200 for an MS license when linux or GoogleOS or other are free), Google for example is pushing the cloud and web based apps, this all ties in nicely as HTML5 nears completion.

Apples fantastic advertising campaign is working inspite of Macs being significantly more expensive, people like the ease of use whether its mythical or real.

The marketplace is changing. The very fast release of Windows7 is evidence of this, if MS doesn't get it right there is serious risk of them losing significant market share in the next 5-10 years.

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What, you disagree with something I said? There's a shocker...

So because you did it, the entire industry will follow suit?

10 years ago the linux/mac fanboys were saying the same thing.

The speed of Windows 7 has nothing to do with marketplace changing, it has to do with the crap OS that is Vista. It is not a full release, it is only an incremental one, despite what MS will tell you. There is not enough changes or differences of the 2 OS's to be called an entirely new OS.

You are only speculating anyway, history supports what I said.

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