Unreal Tournament 2004	Source: Epic

Unreal Tournament 2004 is the sequel to the highly popular UT2003 and uses the very latest Unreal Engine technology. Unreal Tournament 2004 employs the use of Vertex and Pixel Shaders and it's recommended that you use a DirectX 9 videocard if you plan to play competitively.

UT2004
dm-rankin	FPS	Ranking
WindowsXP 32-bit Stock (2.4 GHz)	124.13
WindowsXP 32-bit Overclocked (2.64 GHz)	137.27
WindowsXP 64-bit Stock (2.4 GHz)	129.62
WindowsXP 64-bit Overclocked (2.64 GHz)	141.9
as-convoy	FPS	Ranking
WindowsXP 32-bit Stock (2.4 GHz)	84.2
WindowsXP 32-bit Overclocked (2.64 GHz)	93.58
WindowsXP 64-bit Stock (2.4 GHz)	86.88
WindowsXP 64-bit Overclocked (2.64 GHz)	95.03
ctf-bridgeoffate	FPS	Ranking
WindowsXP 32-bit Stock (2.4 GHz)	175.62
WindowsXP 32-bit Overclocked (2.64 GHz)	195.86
WindowsXP 64-bit Stock (2.4 GHz)	179.36
WindowsXP 64-bit Overclocked (2.64 GHz)	195.86

UT2004 seems to like WindowsXP x64 Edition slightly more, but things are pretty close here too as well.

Doom 3	Source: id Software

Doom 3 is the most advanced game to date. it takes advantage of the latest videocard technology and pushes the processing power of the CPU to its absolute limit. At its highest setting, Ultra quality, texture sizes pass the 500MB mark which means even tomorrow's videocards will have a hard time running everything. The frame rates in the game itself are locked at 60 fps so anything above that point is wasted. Each test is run three times with the third run being recorded.

Doom 3 LQ 640x480
Operating Systems	FPS	Ranking
WindowsXP 32-bit Stock (2.4 GHz)	122.8
WindowsXP 32-bit Overclocked (2.64 GHz)	136.7
WindowsXP 64-bit Stock (2.4 GHz)	111.9
WindowsXP 64-bit Overclocked (2.64 GHz)	118.6

Possibly due to immature drivers, WindowsXP x64 Edition falls way behind on this benchmark. It's interesting to see that overclocking does not boost performance as much in the 64-bit WindowsXP x64 Edition as it does on the 32-bit WindowsXP operating system.

Like its 32-bit counterpart...

The first thing we noticed when testing in the 64-bit world was that the test system could not overclock as high as when it was using the 32-bit version of WindowsXP. With the 32-bit OS, the AMD Athlon64 4000+ processor could overclock as high as 2.72 GHz (Prime95 stable). When WindowsXP x64 Edition was installed, the system would only run stable at an overclocked speed of 2.64 GHz. We're not sure where the limitation is... perhaps 64-bit registers require something more stable than even Prime95 can detect.

During testing, we generally noticed a similar performance boost due to overclocking in both WindowsXP x64 Edition and its 32-bit WindowsXP counterpart. There were a few differences however. We noticed some weird Multimedia numbers in SiSoft Sandra 2005 (64-bit compatible) as well as low Doom 3 scores. This could be due to immature drivers or the operating system itself.

Despite the odd numbers from SiSoft Sandra, CPU crunching applications like Super Pi, piFast and ScienceMark and games like UT2003/UT2004 were all very close in terms of performance. When comparing 32-bit applications to 64-bit apps, we also noticed some substantial gains from using WindowsXP x64 Edition, especially in ScienceMark 2.0, MiniG-ZIP and in DiVX encoding - heavy duty number crunching applications.

If you're running a Microsoft WindowsXP PC based on a 64-bit compatible CPU from AMD (or Intel), and are thinking about jumping onto the new wave of 64-bit OSes with WindowsXP x64 Edition, these overclocking results are definitely something to consider. The move may or may not improve overall system performance, the answer to that is based both on the applications you run and whether you can achieve an equivalent overclocked speed.

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