64 Bit and Gaming...

If you were cpu bound wouldn't 64 bit increase your performace and a fairly good amount considering 64 bit increases your cpu bandwidth and number crunching ability? Would 64 Bit not increase FPU performance also?

(This is if you had a game made for/around 64 bit (crysis, bioshock, ect...) and you are 100% cpu bound.)

 

It's give or take. Technically, a 64-bit coded game would run better (the same way the games with SMP patches run better when it's enabled). However, the problem is that you would need to run a 64-bit OS. Both 64-bit Operating Systems and 64-bit drivers are pretty buggy right now (including Vista), so they end up hindering performance more than helping in most cases. In a few years, I expect this will change, but right now, that's just the way it is.

 

The only game I saw with 64 bit was farcry and the fps difference was very small.

Where games are really going to go 64 bit is when you need more than 2gb ram

 

I meant if it was not all buggy. Maybe in 6months or a year.

 

The OS'es aren't really buggy at all. They're often missing some drivers. But bugs aren't the problem. Both Windows x64 and Vista 64bit are perfectly stable and bug-free (Well, as bugfree as any version of Windows, anyway)

Anyway, the "problem" with 64 bit is that it doesn't allow your CPU to execute more instructions faster.So in many cases it won't make a difference (Or rather, the part of the 64-bit extensions related directly to 64-bit, won't make a difference. There are other improvements, which will speed things up a bit)

Basically, 64 bit CPU's can't crunch more numbers, they can crunch bigger numbers. And that's only an advantage if you have big numbers that need crunching.
Games typically don't have that need.

But as I said, there are a few other improvements that help in any application. Twice as many CPU registers is very useful, and better stack management also helps.

(Btw, the FPU is pretty much unchanged in 64-bit mode. At least, it still works on the same data types)

 

It would appear that all the software makes would have to do is redisign the way the program crunches all its numbers than they could get a "noticible" performance difference or atleast beable to do more complex things. Would 64 bit also increase Folding@home score and other @home things?

 

Be able to do more complex things, yes. Get a noticeable performance boost, no.
(Or rather, they'd be able to get a noticeable performance boost when doing complex things, but there's nothing to be gained when *not* doing complex things)

I doubt your ...@home scores would be impacted very much. They tend to rely on floating point operations more than anything else, and 64-bit CPU's don't really add much to the capabilities there.

 

This is mostly what I expected. Thanks for all your help.

 

What I have seen some systems do is they'll throw two 32bit numbers together into a single 64bit number, then calculate those together, and split it back apart at the end. That only works for some specific data, and ruins your accuracy, but it will pretty much double your calculation speed if you don't need the extra accuracy.

But that's only very specific applications. It's not going to happen in most places, so what Jalf said is correct as far as almost any consumer is going to care.

 

Uhoh hold on to your hats people, Pita on the subject of 64 bit!