Gaming In 64-Bit: Tom's Tests, Microsoft Weighs In

i went 64-bit from last year. i hope that game devs go 64-bit. and every programmer too.

with Windows 7 around the corner, m$ already said that they expect the majority of windows installations will be 64.

"Given the very known nature of these virtual address space limitations, you’d think that game developers would be taking a more hurried approach to making the transition."

This mainly has to do with resources. Most developers use the same engine they've built or bought for a span of many years. Take bioware, for instance, who used the Auroa engine for 9+ years, knowing that it was limited to single threads and low memory.
To switch to 64-bit, these developers would have to take the time not just to modify their existing engines, but more likely rewrite the entire engine because of the changes involved. Something that some developers just cant afford.

Oh, and deffinately drop GTA. None of the GTA or games that use the GTA engine have ever been any good on PC, and have never been consistant in indicating graphics performance due to their poorly developed and optimized code. It's a waste of time.

I say the benefit of having full access to 8GB of DDR2 is enough to make me switch to 64 bit. Not using a Page File and being able to use native 64 bit programs like those found in CS4, is worth it enough. The advantage of being able to execute native 64 bit instructions is absolutely heavenly powerful speed boost(CS3 vs CS4).

indeed 64-bit is good and you can see that in games and applications which take advantage from it. it might require a bit more ram but then 64-bit can handle more applications running at the same time and execution of those applications seems to be alot faster that is what i can tell from my experience with 64-bit vista

One of the reasons that x64 games might run slower on 3GB of system memory than their x86 counterpart is that x64 code should be somewhat larger due to the 64 bit addressing itself. If the x86 code is already feeling the squeeze on 3GB, the x64 code will be even more so - resulting in more memory swapping to disk. Also, one of the benefits of x64 code is the use of more general purpose registers which the x64 games tested here might not have made use of.

Chris - could you check the same thing on AMD platform? AFAIK there are some performance differencies between AMD and Intel @ 64bit

^ There were some on Linux with the Athlon 64 and Pentium 4. Gap has really closed tho, I'd say.

heh we forget the main concepts here with 64-bit:

NO ONE uses a system with nothing bar windows a single game installed - they have a few security apps, torrent apps, messenger, keyboard/mouse apps etc - they all sap up resources, so 64 bit gives all apps all the memory they need - for example 8gb is useless to a 32-bit app, but when you got that hungry game ASWELL as a hungry background app etc they both get the full amount of memory!

Also lessens the "thrashing" effect on HDD's and helps there lifespan etc


As for why there arnt any benifits for 64 bit games etc - there all still native 32-bit because all those morons still think there 2gb and XP is "sufficent and up to date" - move to 64-bit so we can all benifit!

^ +1

We should all be 64 bit.

Those who play hardcore games should have at least a x64 proc.

So, devs should make 64bit games simply.

The world will transition in due time.

We just are at the frontier.

If simply for the allowance of more ram it makes sense, however Vista64 has even more hardware compatibility issues than Vista32. Trying to install a linksys wireless card was a no go, even with guides and bodged drivers the result was poor, I resorted to an USB wireless adapter instead which is pretty lame.

IMO 64bit OS will be trully significant for home/game users when 3 things happen:
1) Games and applications will demand more than 2GB RAM each (we're still far away from this reality).
2) Games and applications will be truly multi-tasking, multi-process, competing each other, and requiring plenty of memory each.
3) Windows and software houses stop having 32bit versions and 64bit will be massified.

Currently most benchmarks and articles search for a motive to upgrade to 64bit on performance, which is wrong while home applications and games don't demand more than 2GB RAM each. Today it has nothing to do with performance gains, since as benchmarks reveal it brings no relevant advantage.

Virtualization (like VMWare ESX and Citrix Xen) is a good motive to have lots of installed memory over 4GB but that's an area for enthusiasts, developers, students and enterprises, not for the masses.
In an absurd analysis, if each game had its own independent OS to be loaded through a virtualization OS then i'm pretty sure 64bit were pretty much developed and maybe today the standard was 32GB RAM on 16-core PCs! :-)

I'd like to see you guys keep GTA for the benchmarks. I disagree with an earlier poster, I think all the GTA ports have been great fun on the PC. I do agree with what was said in the article about it being a hassle with Social Club and Windows Live. Running a mod that disables windows live has been reported in user forums to yield a good amount of extra performance.

Of course 64-bit would yeild more advantages.

When your playing WoW, your not just playing WoW,atleast it dont.

Your running ventrilo,xfire, and sometimes itunes for music, and with 6gb you'd be able to do it no problem.

GTA4 is a very good benchmark, especially in testing MODERN machines. by modern machines, i mean quad core, with lots RAM and vRAM. the only reason it's been viewed as unoptimised is because those dual core losers don't understand the future of computing.

64bit is the minimal anyone building/buying a machine should be looking at, and 4GB/6GB is also the minimal. Microsoft should have stopped making Win Vista 32bit from the beginning. as always, software developers are too slow to catch up.
for Win7, with netbooks as part of target audience, Microsoft should ONLY have 32bit netbook edition. all other desktop editions should be 64bit without question.

posted on a quad core, 8GB RAM, Vista 64bit and sitting here waiting for more native 64bit programs

Who cares about gaming. I am sort of fed up with this site talking mostly about gaming and overclocking. It did not use to be this way many years ago... Please change the name to "tomsgamesandoc".
Great discover... A game (which performance depends mostly on the GPU) doesn't improve when running in a 64Bit os... Wow... Very strange uh? Expecially considering that the code is in 32bit.
This ignorance of "testing" is almost offensive for IT professionals who know what they are talking about.

Why don't you try the difference with some native 64-bit apps? Ray-tracing anyone? Video encoding?

DonalDuck[/nomThis ignorance of "testing" is almost offensive for IT professionals who know what they are talking about.Why don't you try the difference with some native 64-bit apps? Ray-tracing anyone? Video encoding?

Virtualization as i said in a post here... (did you read? ...)

DonalDuckWho cares about gaming. I am sort of fed up with this site talking mostly about gaming and overclocking. It did not use to be this way many years ago... Please change the name to "tomsgamesandoc".Great discover... A game (which performance depends mostly on the GPU) doesn't improve when running in a 64Bit os... Wow... Very strange uh? Expecially considering that the code is in 32bit.This ignorance of "testing" is almost offensive for IT professionals who know what they are talking about.Why don't you try the difference with some native 64-bit apps? Ray-tracing anyone? Video encoding?

Your missing the point, when running a game, like i said, you could be able to do other things, not be limited to the game and fear lag if you say, decide to go on google for a second.

use 4870x2 in CF. Supposedly AMD has better support for 64-bit.
And using more powerfull GPU eliminates the bottleneck.

use 4870x2 in CF. Supposedly AMD has better support for 64-bit.
And using more powerfull GPU eliminates the bottleneck, to see the real diferents.
I am from Argentina sory my inglish.

This is the second awesome article I've read on Tom's in two weeks. Great job.

It's weird. AFAIR x86-64 CPUs have double lenght double number GPRs and XMMs. So with proper optimization should've much better performance (up to ~20% I think). Yeah, there are not many double precision calculations, but still more registers should bring better performance. I guess 64bit compilers are still far from perfect.

Quote:

The bottom line is that you won’t see game-changing benefits from the apps you play today. But when you consider , the decision to go 64-bit should be an easy one.

Same crap I heard 4 years ago and I still don't see widespread utilization of 64-bit. The only difference now is that the 64-bit device drivers aren't absolutely terrible. Other than that, it's the same old argument:

"Will I benefit from this switch?"
"Weeeell... not exactly. Not right now anyway."
"Ok, call me when I do."

No Dev wants to support two versions of the same program (otherwise Linux would have a lot more games ), so until most everyone shifts to a 64-bit OS, you will continue to see lackluster 64-bit support. Its the same deal with DX10, you won't see any games developed soley for DX10 until XP loses more market share.

We won't see many 64-bit games (let along games designed to be 64-bit from the start) until M$ kills of 32-bit OS's (Windows 8), so I think we need 4-5 years before 64-bit programming takes off.