Percentage of users on 32-bit Windows

[rambo]

We are about to switch our mod (Scattered Evil) to 64-bit but before doing so, I wanted to check what percentage of this community was still running 32-bit Windows.

Consult this page if you are not sure: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... 64-bit-faq . Feel free to go into details in a post.

[Nevander]

I'm on 64-bit Windows 7 although I use standard 32-bit GZDoom.

[Rachael]

Hard download counts indicate that 17.1% of users downloaded GZDoom's latest version as 32-bit instead of 64-bit.

Here are the actual download numbers: (Note this only pertains to zdoom.org downloads, not for third-party site downloads)

[Graf Zahl]

For older versions the percentage has been around 25%. So it looks like 32 bit is slowly disappearing from the market. (Finally.)
Of course we never know how many users with a 64 bit system still download the 32 bit version out of lack of knowledge what they can run.

[Rachael]

Oh, a couple things I forgot to mention -

The download counters are for GZDoom 3.1.0, and Mac OS X is counted as a 64-bit download (to be quite honest, I honestly do not believe there are many Macs with 32-bit Intel processors, as the architecture change happened right around the time that 64-bit was picking up momentum).

[wildweasel]

(to be quite honest, I honestly do not believe there are many Macs with 32-bit Intel processors, as the architecture change happened right around the time that 64-bit was picking up momentum).

The initial change-over did result in a few models being manufactured with Intel Core Duo (Yonah) processors, limited to 32-bit instructions. But unless any of our Mac-using audience are using late-2006 iMacs (and thus a macOS no newer than 10.7), I don't expect there'll be much cross-over. Considering the way the Mac software market tends to deprecate older models very quickly, anyway...

[Rachael]

Yeah - as I said I don't expect there'll be many. They'll be more of an exception than the rule. Most Macs are either PowerPC or Intel 64-bit. An actual 32-bit one would probably be rare enough to actually put in a museum.

Either way, Mac packages tend to be compiled as universal nowadays, depending on the person designing the package, so the same "binary" (or group of?) will work on multiple architectures anyway, for the one in which it is run.

[Kinsie]

Apple are beginning to gradually depreciate support for 32-bit apps entirely, so this number will only shrink.

[Outtagum]

I didn't vote but I use both around 50/50. 64 bit on my desktop and 32 bit on my laptop. No one system has more use for Doom than the other. I'm sure there'll be others who use both 32 bit and 64 bit so that'll probably skew download figures.

Regardless though, I do have access to a 64 bit system.

PS: What benefit does 64 bit GZD have over 32 bit?

[phantombeta]

@Outtagum
It can use much more RAM if needed. 32-bit is locked to a maximum of 4 GB of RAM usage.
Of course, it shouldn't reach that usually, but if you're the kind of person who uses x4 scaling with mods that make heavy usage of sprites and textures (any type of image in general, really) it might help not get Out of Memory errors.

(I think maybe it should be faster too?)

[Firebrand]

Instructions of executable files compiled in 64-bits are a bit more fast for 64-bit processors, which is the main benefit you get here, things run a bit faster compared to 32-bits, which is mainly the big change in the case of our mod , I've updated the version of MSVC I'm using for compiling the Vavoom exe we are using, so that's why this poll is being posted.

[Outtagum]

Cool beans. Thanks for the answers guys.

[Hellser]

The problem with upgrading to a 64-bit system, you lose support for 16-bit applications. Which, let's be honest. When was the last time you ran the DOS version of Doom from the Command Prompt?

[Rachael]

DOSBox takes care of that pretty nicely.

Doom (even in DOS) was always 32-bit, the 16-bit support loss is because of the removal of NTVDM in 64-bit Windows, which is problematic with 32-bit extenders anyway, such as what Doom used.

In fact, all versions of Windows past Vista basically didn't support fullscreen apps anyway - which automatically puts Doom.exe out because graphical DOS applications will no longer run inside a window.

[gwHero]

I have a 64 bit Windows system and also using the 64 bit version of GZDoom, but had to switch back to the 32 bit builds for a short period of time because of driver problems that occurred with the 64 bit version only. So it can be convenient in some cases to have the 32 bit version as a fallback, even on 64 bit Windows.