Win7 slower than WinXP

[mrchrister]

Hey guys,

in my cab I have a Dual Core AMD Athlon 2,26 Ghz, 2 GB Ram and Nvidia 9600GT

I was running XP on it just great for 2 years now. But it kept bugging me that Zelda The Windwaker on Dolphin played just a tick choppy, emulation was at like 90%...
Since the AMD is 64 Bit I decided to put Win7 64Bit on there to see if I can get 100% speed. But to my surprise Dolphin 64bit didnt run any faster than the 32bit version.... even a bit slower!
Everything else is pretty much the same except NullDC which runs slower as well.... Could it be that 32bit applications run a tick slower on a 64bit platform?
I really wonder if there is anyway to make NullDC run faster... I tried out several options but the optimum settings were the same ones I used under XP!

I wonder if I should just switch back to XP.... would be a pain though since I have to reconfigure Windows then!

[dmarcum99]

your 2gb of ram may be hurting you.  I hear that you need 4gb+ to fully utilize 64-bit. My desktop has 64-bit win 7 and had 4gb and ran just fine.  When I took a 2gb stick for another pc build my desktop took a noticeable hit.

But if your worried about a particular emulator's performance, I'd go to their forums and see if anyone else has similar issues.

[Thenasty]

try this first:

disabe AERO, just set it up for basic theme. Under performance set it for PERFORMACE not the FANCY crap.
diasble UAC too.

use GAMEBOOSTER, that will help with speed.

Also for MAME (maybe some emu's too), lower the samplerate to 22khz instead of 48/44khz

Increase RAM to 4gb.

[mrchrister]

Thanks for the tips!

I'll buy neew ram and report back!

[ark_ader]

Actually you need 8GB for Windows 7 x64. More the better.

But if XP was running fine, why did you change?

[notroubleclubber]

Actually you need 8GB for Windows 7 x64. More the better.

But if XP was running fine, why did you change?

Rubbish. I've got 4gb of ram on my athlon 6400 x2 and it runs perfect. Even with 2gb of ram it ran fine but just a bit slower but still ok.

[mrchrister]

I just tried out the suggested options:
gamebooster didnt have any effect and aero was switched off anyways...
I also tied out Readyboost on a fast USB stick... no effect!
I have the feeling that nulldc runs a tick slower because its a 32bit application and has to be emulated in a 64bit environment... does that make sense?

I switched to win7 because I hoped to get more speed with dolphin 64bit (which didnt happen)
I'm about to switch back to XP even if that means a lot of configuring again (bleh) because ram for my system runs around 100 euros which is too much for the old system somehow! i can only have 4 gb in total anyway since the max sepcification for the board is 2gb per slot and i only have 2 slots...

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

I believe 32bit code runs native under x64 on any modern processor, there's no 'emulation' so to speak.