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I'm looking at building a new machine (the i7s make the timing seem about right) and I'm considering installing the 64-bit version of Vista on it; I do a fair amount of graphics rendering, and I figured a OS that took advantage of 64-bit architecture might be beneficial. Does anyone have experience with 64-bit versions of Vista? I know Vista itself is a bit of a beast, both in terms of resources consumption and backwards compatability; I'm wondering if Vista 64 is significantly worse, in people's experience.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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64-bit Vista is actually more stable than 32-bit Vista, driver-wise. However, you'll find fewer drivers for it, and a surprising amount of software isn't even remotely compatible. In terms of resource consumption and backwards compatibility, it's worse than 32-bit Vista.
That said, it is capable of hosting many more resources (especially memory), so ultimately wins the resource consumption battle (provided you've shelled out for the extra hardware). And the stability is better, which -- depending on what software you need -- is probably worth the trade-off.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Games and image editors, in particular. Support is very patchy. You'll want to check your software against the compatibility list, and Google "Vista 64-bit <software name>" for anything you really care about.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Any specific games that surprised you? Just trying to get a general idea of how new games will need to be to be compatible.
Are there any general rules of thumb (in your experience), like "All DirectX 10 games are 90% likely to be compatible" or something?
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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I've personally run into issues of varying severity with Sid Meier's Railroads!, Dawn of War, Sim City 4: Rush Hour, F.E.A.R.: Extraction Point, GameTap, Medal of Honor, Rise of Nations, and Corel Paint Shop Pro X. Some of these were resolved by hunting down patches, manually-configured .ini fixes or startup switches, etc. Others -- like the fact that Sim City 4 still just likes to randomly crash about about 12 minutes of play -- persist.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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I've had very little trouble with Vista 64 bit and while it does require a lot of ram, it supports a lot of RAM too. RAM is cheap so don't consider that a significant downside.
Like Tom, I think you should mainly look out for compatibility problems with software you intend to use. By itself, Vista 64 bit works quite well in my opinion.
Mainly, it's fast. Things happen much faster than they did in XP. Boot is fast, even with numerous services and startup programs. Get a multi-core processor, BTW...assuming you can find anything else these days. BTW I'm using the SP1 version; I didn't have much experience prior to the service pack. I understand the initial release suffered from some ridiculous delays with file moving and deletion, in a few cases. That seems to be gone now.
All my Steam games run fine, including a bunch of Valve titles, and some Popcap and Nadeo games. I've downloaded a bunch of demos and haven't had any problems that I can recall with running them. Just got Fallout 3 through Steam and so far so good with that title too. (I envision a gaping chasm into which I will throw a lot of time for the sake of that world though. )
Actually I recall now that I was having some trouble with the network adapter. It would stop working after extended browsing sessions, requiring either a reboot or disabling and re-enabling the device. I think that was a problem with the driver from Nvidia - I updated the onboard ethernet driver a few months ago and it's been fine since then. I imagine newer motherboards will have been better tested and you can always look for ones on the official compatibility list and with WHQL certified drivers.
Posts: 4287 | Registered: Mar 2005
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I'm looking at the i7 940 quad-core CPU. It's beaten the Core2 Extreme chip in many recent benchmark tests, at about half the price.
And I'm looking at 3 GB of RAM to start with (triple channel.) I recognize that's on the low end for a 64-bit system, but I figure adding more RAM later is one of the easiest and cheapest things to do- right now I'm putting my money into the chip, mobo, and video card.
Steam is one of my bigger considerations; I have a fair number of games through them, and I'd hate to lose 'em, so I'm glad to hear you haven't been having problems, scifibum.
My sister has been mentioning problems with Civ 4 on Vista, which is a pity, but at least I know that runs on my laptop.
Most of the graphics work I do is in Poser and Anime Studio, both of which claim to be more-or-less Vista 64 compatable (the worst of it being that I might have to turn off the spiffy Open-GL previews on the former.)
Part of me thinks I should make a small partition for Windows XP 32 bit just to be on the safe side...
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:Originally posted by ketchupqueen: Vista + me=
YMMV.
(*sigh*) Yes, so I've heard. (Not from you specifically, but... In general. Lots of unhappy stories about Vista.) The 64-bit version is reputedly more stable; I'm hoping the compatability issues aren't head-bashing.
But... The bottom line is, I'm getting new hardware, and I don't really expect new drivers to be available for XP for much longer. I'd like to build a computer that can run most of what I'm likely to throw at it respectably for a good four years. If Windows 7 were available today, I'd consider it. But I really am seriously considering a 32-bit XP partition.
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BTW I'm using the SP1 version; I didn't have much experience prior to the service pack. I understand the initial release suffered from some ridiculous delays with file moving and deletion, in a few cases. That seems to be gone now. ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
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