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

[Guest]

Please do more GTA4 benchmarks...It's a great game and I would love to know what hardware will give me the best performance for the $ when it's time to upgrade again.

 

[average joe]

I have been on the 64 bit bandwagon for a while now. I started with Windows XP64 but drivers were a nightmare so I returned to XP Pro 32. Then when Vista came out I set up a dual boot with XP32 and Vista Business 64 with 2 gigs of Ram. Vista seemed much to slow slow I bumped my RAM to 4 gigs which helped a lot. I kept XP for gaming but the 4 gigs didn't seem to make a difference. Recently, I upgraded my system to a quad core and bumped my ram to 8 gigs and got a 1 gig video card. 8 gigs is nice and fast in Vista. I finally dumped XP entirely and now dual boot to Windows 7. Gaming is slower in Vista 64 than XP but not enough to make a difference now. I can play Rise of Nations while AVG scans and Facebook, Outlook, and MSN messenger are going on my 2nd screen. It will hold 59 min - 60 max FPS the whole time. It's not a very intense game but it's still impressive multitasking.

 

[joejamesatou]

How many times can you say 64 bit supports more than 4GB of RAM and 2GB per application? This article could be cut in half if that was the opening sentence and not repeated every paragraph.

Then, let's offer contradictory statements:

Opening page-
"Today, 64-bit compatibility is almost a given."

Conclusion -
"Sixty-four bit adoption started off slow and is still trudging along."

Then add in the obligatory AMD love that is standard in every tomshardware.com article. Not a very good article.

 

[Guest]

"We’ll even take our own medicine. Many of our most recent reviews already employ 64-bit environments, but in the weeks to come, expect to see a benchmark revamp, where we shift as many of our tests as possible to the latest 64-bit versions."

Sure switch to evaluation metrics that most of us don't have.
In the preceding tests you should have gone one step further and provided 2GB RAM benchmarks with 32 bit and for sure there would not be much difference with current games. It is my observation that many games will indeed crash when they hit the 2GB of memory mark on a 32 bit system with 4GB memory installed. However just having 2 GB installed this does not seem to happen and in fact the games run faster because better memory timings can be used.

It's not that I am against 64 bit in fact I am looking forward to it but it seems that Tom's is losing touch with the reality of the home computing audience. As an example all this bally-who over the questionable Crysis engine and the claims of bloated hardware to run it is ridiculous. I mean come on Tom's! 50 bucks for the game and $3000 to play it? Crysis can be run on a modest system simply reducing the resolution and by not using Anti Aliasing.

So please when touting 64 bit lets be factual and real for the average user too.

 

[maximiza]

I don't think you could do true 64 bit gaming with Pci-e 2.0 video cards. You will need Pci-e 3.0 or 4.0. Too much bottlenecking at this level currently. I see it definlty happening in a few years. I agree with the article, memory prices have to come down.

 

[fatedtodie]

64-bit gaming suffers from the same problem as Multi-core Gaming. Companies not wanting to invest in current technologies but wanting to rush out the next product and get more money. Though if they made a 64-bit, Multi-core engine now, it would last for the forseable future. If they halted developement on cookie cutter games and made 1 really badass game it could revitalize the PC gaming industry and even force the console gaming industry to new heights.

I want it to be a race for the best MADE game. The fact the Wii exists with its horrible graphics is a travesty to current technologies. If Coders and Producers held themselves to a higher standard, then people would be battling for the top game of the year and money would flow like water.

 

[Niva]

The point of the article was indeed about gaming, yeah there are other segments for which 64 bit makes a lot more sense, but gaming is much broader (massive user base) and there were promises made. I for one don't even understand why Microsoft continues to release 32 bit OS versions, if Vista had been a 64 bit only a vast majority of the troubles of early adopters would not have happened because people would've bought new hardware instead of trying to run vista on ancient hardware and expecting it to be better/faster than xp or 2000.

 

[astro_16]

This article completely ignores a chief benefit of having 64bit Vista with oodles of RAM which Toms has previously covered and given credence too: You get a MASSIVE SuperFetch (HD cache). Load times of games and loading of level/areas etc. can be much faster.

 

[astro_16]

This article completely ignores a chief benefit of having 64bit Vista with oodles of RAM which Toms has previously covered and given credence too: You get a MASSIVE SuperFetch (drive cache). Load times of games and loading of level/areas within the game etc can be much faster.

 

[Guest]

powerbaselx and RiotSniperX, first of all having huge amount of memory is only a marginal benefit of 64bit computing, and this is

one of the reason I called this article "ignorant".
The performance of running a 32bit game and 5 other 32bit apps does not change at all when running a 64bit os, unless you really

need more than 3Gb of RAM... The crucial factor here is multicore.
C'mon, at home I have 3Gb of ram (32bit OS) and with a few tabs in Firefox, Adobe Lightroom, VLC and Word with a medium size

document (2Mb) I am using around 1.8Gb of physical memory.
Say you are running Crysis, Skype and uhm... Winamp? Do you think you need more than 3Gb of ram???
The same goes for virtualization. VM sure needs loads of ram in a server environment (at work I manage a VMWare cluster with a

total of 76Gb of RAM, and this is not a "big" cluster at all) but 64bit does effect emulation performance in a very marginal way.
Ok, I myself sometime (very rarely) need to run 3 or 4 concurrent VM in a virtual network at home (in VMWare Workstation) so I

would benefit from having more than 3Gb of ram but, as I said, thinking of 64bit only in terms of: "ohhh, more RAM" is ridiculous.

You want a test? Try running an 32bit integer ICT calculation against a well made 64bit version of the same and see what I am

talking about (and note: you only need little ram for pure calculation algorithms).

 

[martin0642]

When people here say we should have "at least" an x64 cpu, what would be optimal? I'm not aware of any 128bit x86 processors, or any applications that would use the exabytes of addressable space available to them.

I think Intel's move to triple, and later quad channel memory will be what drives x64 adoption in the OEM sector. Once enough systems are sold from BestBuy and Office Depot with a 64 bit OS, native x64 titles will come out because by that point the gamers will already have swapped over.

 

[computer_chief]

Obviously, with testing framerates, that's mostly controlled via the GPU which is consistent between the systems. Not to mention the Graphics cards have their own memory to use.

How about we test the difference when running a game server? Or the difference seen when hosting a game server and running a client both on the same machine? I bet you'd see differences there!

 

[kezix_69]

I would think that to test whether or not going from 32 bit to 64 bit you would want to use older hardware, no? Maybe I am wrong about how to test that but if the CPU & GPU are rocking shop then the changes seen going from 32 bit to 64 bit and with more memory are so small that it makes your testing look like a waste of time.

I would have rather seen this test done with an older set of hardware.

 

[truehighroller]

The game GTA IV has a bad memory leak you guys should have played it longer and it would have crashed your system eventually. That would have been sweet to note in this article because then maybe R* would fix it for everyone. You can also just watch the memory being used with a monitoring program and see it taking more and more and then boom hard rebot or CTD.

 

[thomaslompton]

The problem with most programmers is they don't truly understand the hardware benefits available. They only see programming limitations in the environment they are used to using.

 

[Guest]

This is wrong:

"Once you factor in device addressing, the magic number actually drops below 4 GB. That’s why it’s common for 32-bit systems with 4 GB to report 3 GB plus change in the Windows Device Manager. It’s not a Windows problem, though. Rather, that’s just how x86 architecture works."

It is a Windows "problem" when you are running Windows on a motherboard with a chipset that doesn't support mapping I/O high. I wouldn't call it a "problem" though, it's a decision Microsoft made with their non-"Server" Windows versions to be compatible with poorly written drivers. Correctly written 32-bit drivers would handle being located above the 4GB physical memory boundary by using bounce buffers and adhering to the guidelines that Microsoft developed and published years ago. Most consumer-grade drivers however were written poorly, and when they were mapped above the 4GB boundary, they tried to access their own memory locations directly and failed. So Microsoft instead maps the driver I/O space over the top of physical memory in 32-bit non-"Server" Windows (i.e. if you run the 32-bit Windows Server 2003 on a computer with 4GB of RAM you will get to use all 4GB of RAM). Linux and Mac OS X do not map driver I/O space over the top of physical RAM in 32-bit and you can use all 4GB in those systems, *unless* the chipset was designed badly.

The best example of such a badly-designed chipset was by Intel in 2005 and 2006, with their Sonoma (915) and Napa (945) chipsets, which stupidly couldn't map I/O high and capped those systems at 3GB *even if* the OS could have used all 4GB in 32-bit mode.

There are also a lot of subtleties involving historical performance choices regarding the TLB, PAE (which has been around since the Pentium Pro and it's 36-bit memory addressing), and the relationship between virtual and physical address space and mapping which websites covering these topics just fail to explain, or when they do, to get right.

This has all caused no end of confusion in any article I've read on this topic, and I'm now giving up on writing to the authors and editors at places like tomshardware, anandtech, etc. since they don't ever respond or correct their articles when I email them, and I guess I'll just have to post comments.

 

[number13]

May I ask then, is the real benefit for gamers and CS4, I'm on the fence about this, I play some games but I am not the hard core gamer, and I have several computers that I use for differnent things, even on for the kids, and I just had a 1U server sent to me, that I have not even set up yet, and I know that it has a 64 bitOS(expected), and will be serving a very large WIFI(wireless) service in a city, but for me in my real world computer use I don't see the software manufactures pushing 64 bit, I can the need in servers but for the average user, just surfing and doing some office work?????

 

[hellwig]

The Original Far Cry used x64 to add more detail to the texture maps. did you notice any difference in the visual quality of the games switching from 32-bit to 64-bit? Modern games are obviously more detailed than Far Cry ever was, but the point of 64-bit is processing more data per cycle.

Personally, besides a couple driver issues (one for a TV tuner card the manufacturer stopped supporting, the other for a 10 year old printer), I've had practically no issues using Windows XP Pro x64 (based on Windows Server 2004). I have to think with Vista x64 (and upcoming Win 7 x64) being a true Vista/Win7 kernel, all new computers should just come with 64-bit versions by default. The average consumer isn't going to know the difference, and any one who cares can ask for the 32-bit version (just as many asked for an XP downgrade). There's no downside to using 64-bit Vista when you need Vista-specific drivers anyway.

 

[bounty]

How important is it that the Xbox360 is 32 bit? PC exclusives are few and far between, and I imagine they try to keep their game as consistant as possible between ports.

Also, while it's nice to see what is out there now, any word on upcomming games? I'm thinking of games like Rage, Shattered Horizon, CryENGINE 3 stuff etc that might be resource heavy and using new engines.

 

[bounty]

http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/44845/Terminal-Reality-Announces-New-Game-Engine

I don't know about the other engines out there... but I do know that the game engine is probably where 64 bits has to start. Any chance for you to send some emails out to these game engine people to get their takes on 64 bits? It would be a good chance for them to pimp their engines and make their case for what they're doing.

 

[nray]

"How important is it that the Xbox360 is 32 bit? PC exclusives are few and far between, and I imagine they try to keep their game as consistant as possible between ports."

Not only are the XBox 360, Playstation 3, and Wii 32-bit instruction sets, but they are big-endian in-order non-superscalar PowerPC RISC 32-bit, very very different from x86, especially x86-64. On top of that, the systems have 512MB (unified), 512MB (256/256 video/system split), and 88MB + 3MB on-die texture memory, respectively, for each game console. As a result, lots of titles are ports, and very few titles are PC-specific these days, and next to no one is trying to squeeze the most CPU capability out of a PC because everyone wants to make as much money as they can across the most platforms, sadly.

 

[nray]

"How important is it that the Xbox360 is 32 bit? PC exclusives are few and far between, and I imagine they try to keep their game as consistant as possible between ports."

Not only are the XBox 360, Playstation 3, and Wii 32-bit instruction sets, but they are big-endian in-order non-superscalar PowerPC RISC 32-bit, very very different from x86, especially x86-64. On top of that, the systems have 512MB (unified), 512MB (256/256 video/system split), and 88MB + 3MB on-die texture memory, respectively, for each game console. As a result, lots of titles are ports, and very few titles are PC-specific these days, and next to no one is trying to squeeze the most CPU capability out of a PC because everyone wants to make as much money as they can across the most platforms, sadly.

 

[snarfies]

[citation][nom]curnel_d[/nom]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.[/citation]

I own GTA3, STA:VC, and GTA:SA for the PC. I played all three of them on a single-core Athlon 64 3000. They all ran fairly well, and at higher graphic settings than the PS2 would allow. GTA4, from what I hear, is shite even on a quad. Not that I'll ever buy it - I refuse to purchase a game that requires any form of online activation.

 

[deuketc]

here are some benchmarks showing the reduced lag in 64bit crysis

32bit: Min FPS: 16.79, Max FPS: 34.25 Average FPS: 29.045
64bit: Min FPS: 20.59, Max FPS: 32.15 Average FPS: 28.07

also found lag in 32bit mode when applying textures to objects
I dont think 1or2 more fps is as important as smooth gameplay, 64bit is sweet

 

[nray]

Regarding this:

"In preparing for this piece, we searched high and low, asking around to hardware and software vendors alike, for evidence of games written to run in a native 64-bit environment. Only two surfaced: Crysis and Hellgate: London (Far Cry was patched to run 64-bit natively too, once upon a time, as was Half-Life 2)."

That's missing the Chronicles of Riddick and Unreal Tournament 2004, the latter of which was a very high profile 64-bit title and shipped 64-bit alongside 32-bit at the time of release.

And I'm confused by the "once upon a time" comment regarding the Half-Life 2 series, because anyone who has Half-Life 2 or Half-Life 2: Lost Coast installed in Steam on a 64-bit system will be running the 64-bit version of the game (though Episode One and Episode Two are not 64-bit, oddly enough, which I've never understood).