It’s official, 64 bit Windows is fun
Although I have an Xbox, I still find flying and adventures are often better on the PC and I am not alone. I am also not alone in that I use 64 bit windows 7 at home for gaming according to this steam hardware survey…
What I am seeing here is that windows 7 is seen as a high performance platform in it’s 64 bit variant. This shouldn’t be a surprise because it’s big brother windows server 2008 R2 is only available as 64 bit. So where 64 bit has perhaps been less of a focus in previous windows versions (certainly for drivers, and third party apps) it is now seen as the future.
A good example of this is the NVidia drivers. My own experience on Vista running Flight Simulator X was that although everything worked the x86 version was noticeably slower than x64 and there were issues in other games (which might not be down to NVidia). However in Windows 7 everything works and in games like Crysis (which also comes in 64 bit form), I can crank up all the effects and details and enjoy all the eye candy it has to offer.
Flight simulator X running at 1920 x 1080p
The other thing that this highlights is that steam are able to run a successful business on the back of windows games (of whichever version). This is a bit at odds with the stuffy image of a PC user in a suit that some ad campaigns would have you believe. I am also pretty sure that the guys at Steam, Eidos, Electronic Arts etc. are also suit averse.
So if you’ve got 3Gb of RAM or more in your machine you might want to have a look at 64bit to make use of that with Office 2010 x64 or just to give your games a bit of a boost.