32-bit or 64-bit Windows Vista for gaming?

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar

Not in general no, Just very specific situations. But again it is caused by my AOpen AOI-831 drivers, it uses this Chip "RaLink RT2501"



Oh I agree that its my Wireless NIC, well the drivers anyway. The only time my system freezes is when I'm doing something internet related i.e. Email attachments, using certain P2P apps....etc Ive had a couple random freezes when initializing Windows Update its only done it once and like i said was random, and probably because I had 4-5 things already running and using my connection.

I redownloaded the driver for it and when I get around to it, I'm going to uninstall them and then reinstall with the freshly downloaded version hoping it may have been corrupted either during download or installation. Because honestly I miss uTorrent...... and abhor the super slow Outlook.



I can't speak for BF2....I lost my entire case with the game in it...and so havent tried it on Vista, but managed to get BF2142 working after it stopped on XP(uninstalled/reinstalled it 5-6 times and still BF2CDKeycheck.exe errored out everytime).

The only other game to give me issues is Madden 07, it installs fine but EA Download Manager keeps telling me it cannot verify ownership, So i got a crack and it plays fine now.( I own it for sure http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/8669/snag0053copyae9.png )
 
64 bit has more issues with games but for demanding games it works better such as crysis and is better for quad core support.
 
I've got 64bit Vista Ultimate running for about a month or so only and no problems so far.

The only "issues" you're going to get are with hardware that's 5 yrs + old like my Epson 1250 scanner and my Pen Power writing pad.

The way that Microsoft works to help promote 64bit is since the release of Vista, they demand that all manufactures must make a 32bit and 64bit version driver for their products to be "MS certified". Meaning if it was not 64bit compliant their product simply wouldn't work on vista (32 or 64bit). That's not a good sign when people do want to switch over to either Vista or possibly Windows 7.

From this point on, we will see more 64bit support. I've told my dad to buy the latest Pen Power writing pad and on their offical website it says "vista 64 compatible". I've also found a work around on the web for my Epson 1250 scanner.

As you can see the trend is both 32 and 64bit support and there's no going back. Rest assured that there will be no compatibility issues with major components : mobo, ram, cpu, video card, hard drive, sound card as those manufactures pretty much have worked themselves out with Vista 64bit.

The days of driver incompatibility are over and now we're just waiting for the 64bit softwares and games to come out.
 
I've been doing some testing on my rig (dual booting XP & Vista Ultimate) and have found an interesting issue when using the Crysis benchmarking tools.

In a nutshell, Vista Home Basic does not include "Aero" appearance option in the control panel, so the default installation is the "Vista Basic" appearance. This leads to a surprisingly high drop in FPS if you play in the non-fullscreen mode (Windows taskbar showing).

The testing I've read seems to indicate that 64bit software is not here yet, but I suggest skipping Vista Home Basic if you can afford it.
 
Ok ive been researching, and from what ive found is that a lot of games run in 64bit using the 32bit emulator.

The BIG PROBLEM is that when it is being 32bit emulated the OS will only utilize 2MB of Memory.

Vista 32bit will use 3.1MB (on average ).

So even if you can use 8MB with vista 64, It will actually be using less that 32bit vista when it comes to games.

Almost all games are 32 bit native as stated in this form earlier.

Im actually getting vista 32 because of this.

After I get vista 32 I will get a cheep upgrade license to get vista 64. Then I will put both OS on my PC.

If I have some need for 64 or 32 I can decide which OS I want to use when I Start my PC. This way I will always get the Max out of 32 bit games and anything else 64 bit.

Regardless to whats been posted here, the 32 bit emulation on Vista 64 is not just fine, it hardly works and has a lower performance.

Vista 64 is the better OS but games are still not being made for it and no one is planning on it. 64 is not backwards compatible.

Yes I know that new drivers and support and what ever are coming out but it all suffers in performance loss.
 
I've got a question, I just bought a new Lenovo laptop running Vista Basic 64. I am trying to install a training game for my work as an EMT the game is Zero Hour Americas Medic. I have been told by the company that makes the game that there is no support for 64 bit only 32 bit and there are no plans for 64 bit compatability in the future.

Can anybody point me in the right direction so that I can play this on my computer?

Thanks,
Irritated-EMT
 


Vista 64x can emulate 32bits applications, I don't know anything about that software you're trying to install, but the only problem would be with the installation, if it uses an old software for that then you might have a problem.

Most of the applications nowdays are 32bits and run perfect in vista 64x, I think that company was thinking about making the whole program 64bit, and that's only necessary when you need huge amounts of memory, and I don't think that program will need it, unless it's 3d realistic, uses physics, etc.
 
Yeah, that's what i've been reading that they should work, but when I run the isntaller it say "extracting files" and then after that it pops up telling me that it cannot install on windows XP 64/vista 64. I had e-mailed them and they say it won't work. So either it is 16 bit or....? Any new ideas?

Thanks a lot for the help,

Irritated-EMT
 
If you check the developer website it says:

"The recommended hardware for Zero Hour is a desktop running Windows XP, SP 2. Vista is not officially supported and MACs are not."

"The game is able to play on Vista 32 bit operating systems only. 64 bit operating systems are not supported."

https://inside.gwumc.edu/nemspi/tech_requirements.htm

The game looks actually really good, I was expecting some kind of retro graphics and lots of text lol,

Well if your laptop only has 1 HDD partition, sometimes you can install your OS on a Flashdrive or an external HDD,
so you can keep vista and dual boot it with XP, and just use XP for that game.
 
I just purchased an ASUS Essentio Desktop and am having an incredibly hard time:

Specs: Intel® Core™2 Quad processor Q8300
8GB DDR2 memory
2.5GHz Processing Speed
750GB hard drive
Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit with SP1
NVIDIA GeForce GT220 Graphics Card

I can't get any of my "old" games to run on this system. Medieval Total War, Civilization, Fable, Arcanum, etc.. In fact, most tell me that i have either don't have enough processing speed (what?!) or just crashes all together. Can someone give me some advice? I'm tearing my hair out over here. Thanks!
 

I haven't tried those games in my pc, but I would try to run the games in "xp compatibility mode", does this happens with ALL games?
 
I tried that, but it doesn't change anything. I also tried playing the games as "Administrator" - with no luck. Someone else wrote that for MTW, you have to turn off [disable] the "AZW shadow-mapping...", but DirectX 10 doesn't allow you to do this. AGHH! I never had these problems on my Dell Windows XP 32 bit.
 
Surprisingly most of my games(freelancer,freespace2,starlancer,etc)run in 64 bit windows vista, so im gonna convert over to 64bit permanently soon, just hope max payne still will run
 
Well the 32bit has a limit of 3.5gb ram and the 64bit has much more. So if you're planning to play the 2010/2011 games with high settings, definitely the 64bit since newer games demand more ram.
 
I recently purchased the parts for a new computer i'm putting together. Since I bought a laptop a year ago, and still have my Vista 32-bit installation cd's so I figured I would save the extra cash and get my computer up and running with this. Since I built this computer predominately for gaming, if and when I do decide to upgrade to a 64-bit OS, will I be able to do so at a cheaper price seeing that already own the 32-bit version? From reading the past discussion I see that gaming is similar on a 64-bit OS, but when should I make the switch to 64-bit? Seeing as my mobo is 64-bit compatible, should I upgrade sooner than later for the reason that gaming will run NOTICEABLY smoother.

Thanks for the help, much appreciated.
 
Hi all,

I've just built a new pc and installed Windows 7 Ultimate, I have 6Gb on board so I'm thinking about going to the 64 bit version but an earlier post in this thread has got me worried; someone said the only problem they encountered with 64 bit Vista was not being able to play Battlefield 2 anymore. This would be disastrous as it's the game I play the most - can anyone confirm or deny that BF2 works/doesn't on 64 bit OS?

Thanks!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom