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I develop (mainly UWP apps for personal enjoyment atm) on a x64 laptop, but in Visual Studio I have been blindly using the default x86 solution platform.

Should I be using x64 or x86? (so ashamed to even be asking)

There's a few previous questions that touch on the subject and mention differences at a high level but these don't really state any solid guidance as to when to use one over the other (noting that you could always perf test as you went and develop using the fastest).

What's so special about x64 and programming x86?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/607322/what-are-the-advantages-of-a-64-bit-processor

Community
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Adrian K
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1 Answers1

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In practical terms, you would use X64 when:

  1. You need to directly address more than 4GB of memory, or
  2. You need very fast (native) processing of 64 bit numerical quantities (including double-precision floating-point numbers)

X86 (32 bit) is suitable for most everything else.

Robert Harvey
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