Valve Unveils 64-Bit Source™ Technology

[ZoFreX]

Cheers for digging that up. Interesting results though - possibly the 64 bit drivers just aren't optimised enough?

 

[The Mullinator]

I have had an AMD64 CPU for nearly two years now but I have held up on getting the 64bit edition of windows XP until the drivers available to it became more reliable. Also until more games started to utilize it. This may just cause me to finally make the switch.

 

[NeoNight]

More FPS.

how much more? are talking like 50% increase or what?

 

[theroadtonowhere]

I dont know if any of you said this yet, but windows offers like a 180 day trial for windows 64-bit, thats what im doing. So if you want to try it out, just download it and ddual boot 64-bit and xp .

 

[mezz]

how much more? are talking like 50% increase or what?

There were rumours of up to 30% at one point. But at the mo that seems far from the truth

Also with games at the mo CPU's don't seem to be much of a bottle neck, even the more basic 64bit CPU's like AMD's 3000+ seem to do almost as well as the very best CPUs, graphics cards seem far more important.

However, once games like UT 2007 start appearing, which were designed with 64bit CPUs in mind from the beginning then we might expect to see more of a difference. I'd wait till then before trying out a 64bit OS. (Or at least wait for some benchmarks saying that the transistion is worth it.)

 

[ZoFreX]

Also with games at the mo CPU's don't seem to be much of a bottle neck, even the more basic 64bit CPU's like AMD's 3000+ seem to do almost as well as the very best CPUs, graphics cards seem far more important.

In Half-Life 2, the cpu is really the limiting factor - it's heavy on AI and physics and very light on graphics (you can play with medium graphics, admittedly without the uber fancy effects, on a geforce 2, and I can play highest settings with anti-aliasing on a sub £100 card) so taking advantage of a 64-bit cpu could technically yield a huge performance increase. UT2004 would be another game where this could be the case (is there a 64 bit version for that? was there an increase?)

 

[mezz]

Yeah, the CPU can be a limiting factor if you have a slow CPU. But (as far as I can remember from bencmarks) practically all 64bit CPUs are already so fast when operating at 32bit that they have ceased to be a limiting factor.

I *think* that the vast majority of 64bit capable CPUs can already do all the non-graphics stuff in HL2 with ease.

 

[ZoFreX]

My cpu's the limiting factor in my rig at most settings and it's 1.8Ghz - HL2 just does not require much graphical oomph. What I mean is, between doubling your graphics card power or doubling cpu power, the cpu upgrade would yield a far greater performance increase. You are right, most 64 bit cpus can already do HL2 "with ease", any midrange or higher computer can, we are talking about the difference between 130fps and 150fps.

Edit: Unless you spawn a lot of stuff in garry's mod