a mate told me i should move to 64bit vista / xp ... rather then using 32bit... since all my hardware is pretty much the best you can get and then i'll be able to use more then 2GB of ram since the 32bit memory address space limit would be negated....

my question is though... the reason for the reconmendation was because my computer is running games pretty crap ever since i moved to vista... i realise there is about a 10% speed loss (untill drives all catch up) because the drives are now running in user space and nor kernal space or whatever it's called... but when i used to get 60fps constant in games and now am getting 30fps if i'm lucky i start to wonder if simply switching to 64bit would do much for me?

32bit space limit is 4gb not 2gb

Now that drivers have matured, the difference in performance between XP and Vista with games is near zilch.

Moving to 64bit alone will not improve performance unless you are using a 64bit program and most games are not. Since a 32bit program has to be virtualized in a 64bit operating system you will see a drop in performance of around 2-3%. Not much

The boost with 64bit OS' with 32bit games, is purely more available ram.
Your large drops in performance is elsewhere. Have you got lots of crap running?

Of course that 32GB includes the first 768MB in which PCIe devices have to reside to be addressed...

Anyway, I was thinking about this recently, and am still annoyed by the amount of stuff I can't run on XP64. For that reason I still use my Mac for virtually everything at home. But then I realised that I haven't even attempted to set up what I do on my Mac anytime I need to run Windows: Run a VM.

I suppose a XP64 primary system with an XP32 VM could do the trick, if you have sufficient RAM.

Anyhow, unless you have a metric assload of RAM, don't bother with XP64.

That's odd, even using 32bit vista I got better fps in cod4 than I did under 32bit xp.

Also most games are still only 32bit so they'll be running in the 32bit emulation bit of vista or whatever the hell it's called

I run vista64 on my gaming machine and it works lovely

so 64bit windows can run on any hardware ? eg. mine?

I'm pretty sue every CPU made for the past 3 or so years has been 64bit.

I have no idea what hardware you have but if its all new... yes most likely

One thing you could try that worked for me was disabling superfetch while playing games. Vista's new super cache thing was whoring up my cpu time and drive bandwidth while playing games caching all the files I had making games run like s*** (20fps maybe). Once I disabled that the games were fine, faster than under xp. Just go into computer management -> services and I think it's called superfetch. Just click on it then click stop, it'll automatically start back up again next time you boot your computer or you can manually start it once you've finished gaming if you're one of those who never reboots.

thanks whoops! thats a f***ing pro tip! anymore? (i especially like how it'll just restart when computer restarts - thats awsome)