Vista 32/64 Question

Cynic Jester

I'm seeing two versions of Vista up for sale, a 32 bit version and a 64 bit version. If I buy one of them, am I stuck with it?

And more to the point, which one should I get? I've got a processor capable of handling 64 bit, but does it work properly? If I use the 64 bit version, can I play my oh so lovely games?

SporkAndrew

If you buy a boxed copy you get a DVD with both. It's only the OEM copies that you either buy 32-bit or 64-bit.

There isn't really any issue with 64-bit, apart from the fact that Microsoft wussed out at the last minute and didn't make it 64-bit only. Yeah there's drivers that don't work, yeah there's programs that don't work, but for 90% of programs you can run them fine through the transparent emulation..

Try and find 64-bit drivers for your mobo, graphics, lan, audio stuff before you do anything though..

Cynic Jester

Right, Thanks. I'll go for the 64 Bit OEM as the boxed version costs like three times as much.

Rook

I'm not convinced with getting the 64bit version at the moment. Unless you specifically gain something from having the 64bit version, why burden yourself with compatibility issues for pretty much no benifits (assuming your main aim is for gaming).

legion

64-bit compatibility has become a hell of a lot better lately. It was shoddy in XP, and hit or miss in Vista during the beta, but since I've installed the retail of Vista, I've not had a problem finding 64-bit drivers, nor have I had any games / programs not work. There are still issues, to be certain, but they're not nearly as prevalent as they used to be. I do tend to find myself using the 32-bit version of IE, oddly enough, since the 64-bit version seems to still have a lot of weirdness going on with plug-ins and the like.

I don't see going either route as being a bad decision really, when it comes right down to it, though. Compatibility hassles with the 64-bit version are negligible, but so are the advantages at this point. I would and have gone 64-bit without any regrets, though, so that's my recommendation.

fogeyman

SporkAndrew wrote: »

If you buy a boxed copy you get a DVD with both. It's only the OEM copies that you either buy 32-bit or 64-bit.

There isn't really any issue with 64-bit, apart from the fact that Microsoft wussed out at the last minute and didn't make it 64-bit only. Yeah there's drivers that don't work, yeah there's programs that don't work, but for 90% of programs you can run them fine through the transparent emulation..

Try and find 64-bit drivers for your mobo, graphics, lan, audio stuff before you do anything though..

The bolded bit was dropped before Vista officially launched. Only the Ultimate version (which is only available through retail) includes both--for the others you have to pay MS some small fee to have them ship the 64-bit version to you.

And a 64-bit OS is largely unnecessary right now. You gain some significant security benefits (bottom of this article) but lose app and hardware compatibility. Right now, your applications won't perform any faster either. Read Paul Thurrott's (his a Windows guru) review here first.

Fartacus_the_Mighty

One big advantage of 64-bit is a larger addressable memory space. That means you can have more than 2GB of RAM. I'm not sure if programs have to be specially-coded to use more than 2GB, though, as they were in XP.

Rook

Fartacus_the_Mighty wrote: »

One big advantage of 64-bit is a larger addressable memory space. That means you can have more than 2GB of RAM. I'm not sure if programs have to be specially-coded to use more than 2GB, though, as they were in XP.

More than 4gigs you mean.

mausmalone

Rook wrote: »

Fartacus_the_Mighty wrote: »

One big advantage of 64-bit is a larger addressable memory space. That means you can have more than 2GB of RAM. I'm not sure if programs have to be specially-coded to use more than 2GB, though, as they were in XP.

More than 4gigs you mean.

Actually, he's half right. The Win32 architecture only allows any individual process to allocate 2 GB of memory at a time. So for application developers, Win64 means going beyond the 2 GB limit.

Anyhow, 64bit edition on an Athlon 64 is fast as all hell. I remember watching the betas running on my friend's computer. Even though it was buggy as hell, anything 64-bit native was running at least twice as fast as its 32-bit counterpart.

TxdoHawk

It seems companies have been promising floods of 64-bit binaries for games forever now, but unless something has recently changed, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot out there at the moment, and the games that have offered 64-bit patches have often shown minimal (4-6%) to zero performance improvements.

We may see this change with newer, more demanding games. The common line seems to be that we'll start seeing big gains when games are able to effectively utilize more than 2GB of memory.

I haven't researched this in quite awhile, however, so I would look for benchmarks comparing recent 64-bit native game binaries with their 32-bit counterparts. I haven't heard a lot of noise about the issue though, so I assume the answer is still the same.

Xantus

mausmalone wrote: »

Rook wrote: »

Fartacus_the_Mighty wrote: »

One big advantage of 64-bit is a larger addressable memory space. That means you can have more than 2GB of RAM. I'm not sure if programs have to be specially-coded to use more than 2GB, though, as they were in XP.

More than 4gigs you mean.

Actually, he's half right. The Win32 architecture only allows any individual process to allocate 2 GB of memory at a time. So for application developers, Win64 means going beyond the 2 GB limit.

well technically you're both half-right.

32-bit can allocate 4gb of memory. by default it is split 2gb for kernel process (os, system) and 2gb for user process(games and whatever).
however you can change the ratio to say...1gb kernel, 3gb user (which I had to do to get Stalker to work in vista 32. it wanted to use more than 2gb of ram)

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