64 bit gaming?

[sc1ence]

I recall about 5 years ago being all excited about 64 bit computing. That vista even came out in a 32 bit version is a big disappointment for me.

I use my home computer for gaming. It has winxp sp3 32 bit running on it now.

I have 4 gigs of ram, and I really want to "use" that 4th gig that windows is not recognizing due the the address space limitations of the 32 bit OS.
I can upgrade to xp 64 bit, or vista 64 bit.

I still read problems about vista gaming and fps hits even after sp1 for vista.
So the question I have is if it is worth the OS upgrade, and if so, should I go 64 bit vista or XP?

[tuoply]

I've been using xp 64bit for a few years now... haven't found a game that I can't play, and most new programs / hardware / software supports a 64bit OS. The only times I've run into issues were when i was trying to use old hardware that didn't have driver support.

For the most part, xp 64 has been stable for me and runs faster than the dual booted Vista 32 bit.

For what it's worth, I'm running 2 gigs of ram (soon to be 4, come on newegg!) and a e6600 oc'd to 3Ghz.

-Scott

[Bamboo]

I am happy with Vista64. Have been running SP1 for about a month. Look back over the last few pages cause we just had a good discusion about Vista 64.
You will probably take a small hit on FPS moving to Vista according to just about every article I have read where they compared the 2 in gaming, but most other benchmarks are close to equal.
Also, you are running a single core if I remember right, and Vista is written to take better advantage of multicore. Not sure what it does on a single as I have never seen a review with that. They always have a dual at least.

[Bamboo]

The article just in:
http://www.anandtech.com/systems/sho...spx?i=3233&p=7

Summary:
"Compared to where we were a year ago, our general recommendation for Vista is unchanged. We are however impressed with the progress of the x64 versions of Vista over the past year, after feeling like it was lagging behind Vista x86 from beta up through the release version of Vista. Vista x64 is now clearly on par with Vista x86 and we have no concerns about its compatibility or performance."

[Cappy]

The only problem i have had with Vista 64 is i cant install 2142. for some dang reason it just wont. i won it in a contest that Battlield Podcast was having which inturn it was downloaded through EA Link. had no problem redownloading it in EA downloader but it wont Install... ive tried everything i know and just wont go.

other then that its been smooth. ive written EA on it multipal times with NO ANSWER, lol go figure but anyway i just gave up on it. lol i like Vista 64 so far and im not going to give it up over a game :P

maybe ill throw another harddrive in this machine and load XP on it but only time will tell, im not missing it that much

[ScratchMonkey]

Check back through the last month of posts. We had a big 64 bit experience thread here recently.

[msdz]

Well, As far as Vista Ultimate x64 goes I like it. Only one small issue and I do not know how to classify it. I would not say that Vista x64 is a bad operating system but the hardware just needs to catch up to the operating system. I think performance is the biggest beef with Vista x64 or x86 versions. Having the proper hardware definitely helps out the performance issues but it still uses quite a bit. To sit idle and use a little over a gig with my AV and a few other start up programs going is kind of high, I am glad I got 4Gb for gaming and background processes. I have only seen it peak at about 80% while gaming but that is still a lot of RAm when idle. Alwso, my E8400 running stock at 3.0Ghz when gaming in CoD4 is at about 47%, not sure if that is on both cores or combined(using the G15 LCD to get that info). Most people I have talked to that have the same exact set up as myself says XP only uses about 18% while gaming in CoD4. I am not sure what to think about that. If it was 100% or even real close I would say it is bad for gaming but I still have some CPU I could go.
I do think hardware will catch up to Vista and real soon, which that means then is software will be even farther behind than the hardware like it is right now. I read an article that claimed that most software, games and applications can not match the hardware that is out ATM except for a few exceptions.

[sc1ence]

Originally Posted by ScratchMonkey

Check back through the last month of posts. We had a big 64 bit experience thread here recently.

It was not gaming focused. It is actually part of what spurred me to post this.

[DirtyLude]

Originally Posted by Cappy

The only problem i have had with Vista 64 is i cant install 2142. for some dang reason it just wont. i won it in a contest that Battlield Podcast was having which inturn it was downloaded through EA Link. had no problem redownloading it in EA downloader but it wont Install... ive tried everything i know and just wont go.

I had a heck of a time with this too. I had a terrible time with the damn PunkBuster afterward. Funny thing is, after all the trouble I went through to get it working, I think I've played it twice.

Haven't had trouble with any other game. Next system will have 8gigs. With Superfetch, TF2 loads up in a few seconds.

[ScratchMonkey]

I think the other thread was "do games run on it?" and here the question is "do they run well?" (and XP versus Vista).

Since I don't run games on all 4 combinations (just XP64), I can't tell you if they will run better, only if they run at all. So far 32 bit versions of Tribes 2, WoW, ETQW, and Bioshock are all working fine. The problems I've had I'd blame on hardware, not the OS.

Garage Games' new Instant Action browser-based game system doesn't support XP64, nor does it support Mozilla Seamonkey (even though it's the same code base as Firefox). It works on XP32 and Firefox, IE6, and IE7. The IA stuff may work on XP64, but the detection code won't even let me try.

Note that 64-bit code has more registers available to it, so that gives it a lot of potential to be faster. The ability to use numbers with more dynamic range isn't as important most of the time.

Most programs spend most of their time in the OS kernel (including drivers), so a loss of FPS in Vista 64 would have to be blamed on poor driver and OS code. Any transition from user to kernel space is expensive, so the trampolines from 32 bit to 64 bit code should be avoided by well-written game code that minimizes those transitions.