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Filed under: Hardware •Post Production •

64 bit OS and Adobe products

I blogged on a tutorial from Event DV around editing workflows with AVCHD.  In that same issue, contributor Jan Ozer wrote an article called CS4 at 64 that delves into the differences that he observed between Adobe applications and how they perform differently between 32bit Windows XP and 64bit Windows Vista.

For me, it’s clear that 64 bit operating systems are becoming more mainstream - or at least among content creators.  The benefits for consumers may be less obvious at present, but I believe it’s just a matter of time.  Over time we have seen consumer PC’s slowly grow in memory and performance from 64MB to 512MB to 2GB and now we’re starting to see 4GB as standard in many value PC’s and even some laptops.  With more software and services available, it means more things running at one time.  In the same way, I believe that XP’s 4GB limit is being felt by creatives today and consumers in a very short while. When it hits consumers, we’ll start to see the shift towards 64bit and away from 32bit.

In the article, Jan lays out his personal findings about CS4 performance between 32 and 64bit systems and his results were pretty amazing. He experienced performance gains between 13% and 227%.  In fact, besides the 13% difference for DVCProHD, all of his findings and results were 50% and above.  That’s the kind of performance gains that we can all be excited about.

The question then becomes why there is the performance gains and does it make sense for me to move (and can I) to 64bit today?

On the issue of ‘can you move to 64bit’, here’s a run down for you.

Mac users: anyone on MacTel platform (Intel instead of IBM/Motorola chips) should be running mostly 64bit already and their hardware is good to go.

For PC people: obviously we have both XP and Vista and each has 32 and 64bit flavors.  Both 32bit versions can address only 4GB of total memory)

Adobe does not officially support the XP64 OS and while I understand why some people might want to consider it, its just not supported, nor do I expect Adobe to change its position on this one.  Vista 64 is the here and now and it’s gone through it’s growing pains. It has arrived as a mature, capable OS for the most part.

To answer the question about what is driving the performance increases, it mostly comes down to memory addressing and how much you can address with 64bit OS’s.  With memory addressing, Vista 64 business will allow you to install over 128GB of total memory.  That’s right, Gigabytes!  With memory around $30 for 4GB (more for good quality memory), it makes sense to load up a reasonable amount as part of your new system costs or as part of a PC upgrade.  It’s pretty much the same on the Mac side as well.  Well over a year ago, I put 9GB of memory into a Mac tower and definitely saw the differences.

The advantage for Adobe applications is as follows.  Photoshop CS4 is native 64 bit on PC (sorry Mac folks it’s a Carbon 64 where’d it go kind of issue - check out John Nack’s post) and provides performance increases on large PSD files.  After Effects and Premiere Pro CS4 are both able to address up to 4GB of memory PER PROCESSOR CORE!  This means that if you have an 8 core system, you can address 32GB of memory for the applications! An 8x increase over 32bit.  Even if you don’t jam in that much memory, having 8 or 16GB of memory is definitely worth having as Jan outlines.

On the Mac side, it is similar but do to some OS issues, Mac users only address 3.5GB of memory per processor core.  Nothing to slouch at to be sure!

What I find interesting is that both Avid and Apple haven’t made much about 64 bit yet - though I’m sure it will change. As people use more diverse types of media, tapeless workflows continue to develop and vendors create tighter integration points between applications (Dynamic Link), it will only be a matter of time before both of these companies move their applications over to 64bit.  Once they do, I’m sure it will be a question in the forefront of every person’s decision - “Is this application 64bit aware?”  For today though, I’m happy to be part of the leading edge.

It’s clear that 64bit OS’s are the future and that Adobe applications are taking advantage of them today. So, if you’re looking for software that is embracing 64bit today, look no further than your CS4 applications.  Throw in some GPU and H.264 encoding performance with a Quadro CX card and you’re cooking with gas!

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There’s a big problem with Vista 64 despite the fact that Adobe only supports it and not xp64. You give away a bunch of those performance gains on Vista. CS3 and CS4 run fine on xp64. In fact xp64 is the fastest way to run Adobe apps period. So if you are serious about performance, as Vista 64 loses anywhere from 10-100% over xp64, xp64 is the way to go.

Posted by stephen v2  on  03/03  at  08:40 PM

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Steven v2,

As you point out most Adobe apps will run fine on xp64, but I wouldn’t advocate users going to that OS for two reasons.  First, we do not officially support it and because of that I couldn’t recommend users plunk down $300 for it.  Second, its the past like it or not. 

I can’t comment on Vista robbing performance from Adobe apps or in general but I will tell you that my experience with Vista has been good.  Too many people are still holding on to Vista’s horrible launch (it really was ugly), but my sense is that most of that stuff is behind us. 

Perhaps your experience has been on a slightly slower system without the benefits of more memory that I describe?

My main point though was to underscore that 64bit is here today and it’s benefits to content creators are tangible.  In my estimation, XP64 is a receding fringe part of that movement.  Thanks for your comments.

Posted by Dennis Radeke  on  03/04  at  06:11 AM

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I understand the official Adobe position (but wish it were very different) but users have to make smart choices price/performance wise. In my informal survey of users, well over 50% of 64-bit users I know are staying with xp64.

Here’s a benchmark of multi-core performance and XP is faster often by a factor of 2 vs. latest Vista and Windows 7 betas:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/09/01/22/03TC-windows-multicore_1.html

That’s my experience as well as far too big of performance gap to ignore.

xp 64 OEM can be bought for $140 which is the way most people buy it from newegg.com, amazon etc.

Posted by stephen v2  on  03/04  at  07:55 AM

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Stevenv2 - I’ll have to dive through this large online article but taking for granted that XP is faster it doesn’t change the fact that XP is going away for the mainstream user.  As a business, Adobe has to make decisions about what OS to support.  Unfortunately, with the large user base considering moving to 64bit over the next several years, XP64 just doesn’t factor into our equations.  I wish I had something better for you there, but there it is…

Antryg - I didn’t hear about what you’re talking about, but am assuming that Microsoft back pedaled on that one.  Even if that weren’t so, I’m sure there are plenty of enterprising people who have figured a way around it.  After all, there is such a thing as a “hackintosh” - a Mac OS running on PC hardware these days so I’m sure that Microsoft can exist with other OS’s on it.  At a bare minimum, with storage cheap, one can purchase a hot-swappable storage system and switch out what OS he/she wants to run.

Posted by Dennis Radeke  on  03/06  at  06:11 AM

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I’m forced to stick with XP because the company I work for is an XP shop. Office Vista isn’t in the works here yet, so it will be an XP shop for a while.

Posted by DanConklin  on  03/17  at  07:28 AM

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I wanted to mention the issue of DRM and other OSs too. If you install GRUB as your bootloader you will be able to boot into whatever OS you want. Also, Microsoft has a free virtual machine that will run in Vista and you can run whatever OS you want in that without rebooting.
DRM isn’t an issue in either case.

Posted by DanConklin  on  03/17  at  07:31 AM

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Hi There
I dont know if you can help but here goes,
as a videographer I have been running CS3 video progs
for a long time on XP Pro with Q6600 cpu 4 gig of ram
(although it couldnt see that much)NVidia Gforce 8600
graphics card and all has been ok nice smoothe video
in prem & encore. so being as i wanted to use more ram
as after effects gobbles it as you know, i decided to
install 64 bit Vista ulimate on a separate drive and
have a duel boot system, The mother board (Abit IP35 Pro)
will take 8gig and supports Vista 64bit so i installed
the extra ram and I only have CS4 installed to stop the
system getting cluttered i dont have Aero on i have
everything set for performance but when i run Premiere
even with a small file i get very jerky video its the
same with encore very jerky video. the strange thing is
if i play the same video file in windows media player
its nice and smoothe no jerking whatsoever if i boot up
XP which has CS3 on it everything is fine and its only
using 3.2 gig out of the 8 gig installed. Any comments
would be appreciated. Many thans Mick

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  06/07  at  04:14 PM

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First things first Mick, make sure your apps on CS4 are all upgraded to the latest versions.  We just published the Premiere Pro 4.1 update which is a major release.  Beyond that, make sure your system sees all 8gb and that your graphic drivers are also current.  Disconnect the drive that has CS3 on it temporarily for testing your new drive.  Run all of your VIsta updates including SP2 which is fairly recent.  In fact, do that first!

hope this helps,
Dennis

Posted by Dennis Radeke  on  06/08  at  05:49 AM

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Thank you for your responce Dennis, will run the updates and see how that goes. MIck

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  06/10  at  03:48 AM

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Approximetly about $30 for 4GB , it makes sense to load up a reasonable amount as part of a new system i think…

Posted by ilanlar  on  03/27  at  04:58 AM

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If you’re looking for software that is embracing 64bit you can look your CS4’s.

Posted by ilan  on  04/22  at  05:05 AM

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