64 Bit CPUS and PC Gaming

Hey, my first post on here. Im looking for a few answers.

Recently ive been thinking about buying a new system, and ive found a few fairly decent ones that have 64 bit processors.

Ive been wondering how do 64 Bit processors affect gaming? Do games and programs work for 32bit or 64bit. Or do they have to been designed for the certain type or patched?

For example the games i play at the moment are

Counter Strike:Source
Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
World of Warcraft

I realy wanted to know how a 64bit processor might impact on my gaming?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Many Thanks.

Since, according to strangestranger's sig he knows nothing, I'll back up his point (just kidding btw strangestranger ^^)

I'm running a Q6600 (64-bit processor) and have used Windows 98, XP Professional, and am now running Vista Ultimate 64-bit. Apart from 98 (cause it's old) they all run CS:S, CnC3, and WoW, since I play all of those anyway. The only advantage that you could gain from a 64-bit processor is if you have 4+ GB of RAM, and the game can take advantage of that. Even if it can't, it'd have a huge chunk of RAM it could take use of that'd be seperate to everything else. Win-win if you ask me

Thank you all, you have been more than helpfull and have put to rest all my qualms.

Once again my sincerest thanks to the three of you.

64 bit has the potential to handle 128 gigs of ram as of now, 64 bit cpus are backwards compatible. I would suggest reading up on what gamers are saying about 64 bit though before i choose it as a gaming platform, as many people are complaining about even more lack of driver support compared to vista 32 bit, and issues with hardware also. Not knocking the 64 bit system, we will all be using it someday, its just that you should read up on what you may be getting yourself into right now if you go that way.

I believe all the game that contain a "Games for Windows" logo on the package must be compatible with 64-Bit OS. I don't know whether or not that specifies natively or emulated, i.e. wow64.

As far as I know Far Cry and Crysis are the only games that take advantage of 64 bit. I remember seeing a before and after screen shot of Far cry after the 64 bit patch was released, the main difference was under 64 bit the draw distance was improved.

that doesn't make any sense, you can use 3 gigs and still use dual channel.

Tweak the paging file in XP so you can run 4 gigs. Games run better in XP in 32 bit than they do in Vista 32 or 64. A lot of it has to do with the fact that most games aren't optimized for 64 bit code and the fact that Vista is so inefficient compared to XP that everything runs slower in that OS.

Crom ...great idea.

Ill go 32 bit for my next build.After reading all this ...it only seems to make the most sence.
Neither option is perfect but 32 is the most reasonable.

Uhh tall, whatever your smoking can u share with us please? There is no way microsoft is going to disavow well over half the market, and make them upgrade to a 64 bit platform, that not only cant handle gaming as it is now, but whos support is even worse then vista 32 bit. I dunno what article you read, but you may want to go take a second look at it, and question the authors crediblity if they are truly saying this.

I have an Opteron 185, Windows XP Pro x64, and several 64-bit games. Half Life 2, Unreal 3 powered games, Crysis, Far Cry, STALKER, and a few others benefit from running 64-bit code. Theres a bit of a speedup in fps and loads. Also detail can be turned up without impacting performance as much. Unfortunately 64-bit hasn't caught on as well as some of us would have liked, but Intel's Nehalem may change all that. 64-bit and multithreaded software will hopefully become more abundant to take advantage of Nehalem's 4 cores and Simultaneous Hyper Threading. Intel, AMD and Microsoft are all pushing for more support of these technologies so going 64-bit will probably benefit you sooner than later. As of now though, theres not too many other games other than the ones I've listed that support 64bit.