Perhaps a different point of view, I’ll summarize a few observations I did during beta evaluation, actual results might be different with released PD9. I ran back to back tests with a totally clean system, win7, 32 and 64 bit, with PD9 installed on the box and that’s it. No anti virus, no internet, nothing else. No discussion here on a comparison to PD8 at all, just PD9. I also ran in 2, 4 and 8GB RAM configurations. All evaluation was done with Canon 7Mbps, and 24Mbps, 1920x1080 full HD video streams.
1) 32 vs 64 bit shows no performance change when cpu rendering or gpu rendering as long as what you are doing fits inside the constraints of your PC. On screen editing and movie playback also performed the same.
2) As expected, if the timeline complexity fits within the hardware constraints of your box, increasing RAM did nothing to improve rendering performance or user editing performance.
3) I kept increasing the complexity of the timeline, say several HD video tracks to play simultaneously, or certain fix/enhance features applied to the whole footage, the ram requirements go up. You can easily exceed 2GB ram and trouble abounds (choppy playback, pauses, had several crashes…) on both 32 and 64 bit systems, the same system and timeline with 4GB worked fine. With 64 bit and 8GB of RAM I could add significantly more complexity to the timeline simultaneously without creating issues. This was not possible on the 32 bit system. However, all 99 video tracks in full HD simultaneously played pulled my 64bit, 8GB ram box to its knees in both movie play and produce whether gpu or cpu. A produce to H.264, 24Mbps did complete successfully with 64 bit, 8GB RAM and failed with 32bit and 64bit 4GB configuration.
So in my opinion, as expected, how much ram you need depends on the complexity of your timeline. If 32 or 64 bit is a benefit also depends on the complexity of the timeline. For a simple timeline of dropping in some footage and applying a few transtitions and title or two, both 32 and 64 bit systems with PD9 can perform just fine. To work with complex timelines, 64bit and increased RAM is probably the only option.
The PC at time of testing was:
GIGABYTE GA-890GPA-UD3H, MB
AMD Phenom II X6, 1090T, 3.2Ghz, cpu
Nvidea GTX470, GPU
WD VelociRaptor 300GB, for OS
WD VelociRaptor 300GB, 4 drives, RAID(0) for storage
Corsair Dominator (4 x 2GB) DDR3 RAM
Corsair 850W, PS
win7 32 and 64 bit OS's