64bit Vista and Gaming

Toasty

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I should be receiving a new PC in a week or two with Vista 64bit Home Premium edition. This will be my first experience with Vista and first PC running a 64bit OS. I'm an experienced XP user, so firstly, any tips from hardened Vista users, specifically for tweaking and optimising the OS?

I'm aware there could be issues with game compatibility, can anyone pass on there gaming experiences with 64bit, any games that didn't work or ran worse on 64bit? Our first game will (don't laugh) be Sims 3, specifically for the wife, so if this falls over I'm in big trouble :suicide:
 
I've used both vista 64bit and windows 7 64bit and the incorporated 32 bit emulation works very well in my opinion. I found improvements i the performance in some of my games on the 64bti platforms so i don't think you will have many issues at all.

In terms of tweaking, i would simply make sure you load as much ram as possible now that the 3.2gb limit is gone.
 
I have Vista HP 64bit and the only game I've come across that doesn't work is Far Cry. Far Cry 2 is fine though. I'm not convinced 64bit has a noticeable effect on gaming performance, but hey. It's nice to be able to use 4gb+ of RAM.

What sort of games are you going to be playing? I mostly know about FPS games, not so sure about MMOs and the like...

Jez
 
Never had any issues with any games on Vista 64bit.
 
64bit gamer too. Play some really old stuff like 1942 & WC3.

The interface is a bit different, but as soon as you disable UAC and a few other bit's you'll be right at home.
 
Thanks for the replies, will probably look at games similar to Sims, such as Spores and Settlers. I'll also look at FPS shooters, not had a decent specced PC for a while, so will be good to see how they've come on, oh, and I do like point and click adventures a la Sam & Max. :smashin:
 
Call of Duty 4 & TF2 (via the orange box) are worth a look.
 
never had any issues with any games on vista 64bit.

+1 :)

Good shooting games - Crysis, Crysis Warhead, UT3, Gears of War, Half Life 2, Sin, Left 4 Dead , Medal of Honour (newest one), COD 4 & 5, Far Cry 2, Bioshock.
 
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64bit gamer too. Play some really old stuff like 1942 & WC3.

I'm not sure I'd call them really old - they were only released in 2002.

But yes, this isn't like XP 64-bit. Virtually everything from the last few years can be expected to work on Vista 64-bit and it's fairly good at supporting older stuff as well.
 
I think the only vista/vista 64 specific issues I've ever had with gaming are a few titles or programmes you had to right click them and chose run as administrator and there was a game download company who you paid a subscription too say £10 a month and could play any of the games they had and that didn't have a 64 bit version.

Other than that I've found vista to be a fantastic OS and vista 64 to be even better especially since the first service pack. I can understand why people with older pcs would want to stick with xp but can't understand the vista hate for people with modern pcs, for the first 6 months after release sure there were some really crappy drivers that caused stability issues *cough*Nvidea*cough* but since the early issues have been ironed out its a great os.

oh and sims 3 will run just fine.
 
oh and sims 3 will run just fine.

That is the first hurdle and good to hear, I'll have a dropped a major clanger if this fails :D

Thanks for all the replies, feeling a lot happier about going Vista 64 bit now, as I was a bit nervous after purchase and reading up on compatibility issues :thumbsup:
 
OK, PC arrived this morning and the Sims 3 ran first time out of the box no problems, I now have a very happy missus and I'll definitely be checking out some of the other suggestions above :smashin:
 
Excellent :thumbsup:

Time to download some demos and buy some games. :)
 
Never had any issues myself apart form after a year Ultimate became unusable to the extent I could not longer update my software like itunes as it told me that windows installer did not have the rights among other things.

Again this could be because of the built in active directory style features of security but last night I downgraded back to XP on a spare drive and it flies along.

I will miss the +3.2gb limit however.

If you have a beefy system and keep an eye on what you install and monitor startup programs then its good for gaming.
 
Americas Army 3 is out very soon and is free. First person shooter it is. I am a BF2 player meself which is good too but not free.

BF2 is easy AA3 is going to be harder, much harder.
 
Thought I'd give an update, received a decent specced PC from Chillblast a few days after the Sims 3 release, which kept the missus happy. However, we started experiencing PC crashes, didn't know if it was Vista, PC or Sims, but to cut a long story short, debugged the problem to the front panel USB ports :eek:

Chillblast were great, PC back to base, fixed and back to us within days and all seems well with the world. Sims 3 runs great on it and I'm sure other games will too :smashin:
 

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