64 bit gaming compatibility

Hey guys,

I'm considering upgrading to the 64 bit version of windows 7. However, I heard that compatibility for 64 bit Vista was not good. How is the compatibility for games on 64 bit Windows 7? Are there any major titles that are known not to work? Is there a list of them?

Thanks

 

Any recent title will run in 64bit; it'll just emulate 32bit mode since AFAIK, few(if any) games exist in x64.

 

I haven't seen a comprehensive list, but I've been able to play Modern Warfare 2, World in Conflict, HAWX and Half Life 2 on mine. The only game I can't play is Portal, but I'm not sure if that's an issue with using it in 64-bit or just with Windows 7 in general.

I think most games that are 32-bit should be runnable in 64-bit.

 

Generally, people have actually noticed BETTER performance with a 64 bit vs a 32 bit OS, although I haven't tried it, so I can't verify that myself.

 

Only some very old games won't run on Windows 7 64-bit.
Portal, Half Life 2, Crysis, FraCry, StreetFighter 4, Braid, GTA4, TF2, Batman Arkham Asylum, Mondern Warfare 2, Call of Duty 4, WoW, WarCraft 3, and the list is extremely long... works perfectly under Win7 without any tricks, with performance increase over XP and Vista.

Basically the games that will cause issues are the ones that has have a stupid OS check that doesn't allow newer OS (use compatibility mode to bypass them), games programed in 16-bit (DOS level games), copy protection software which is badly implemented or uses a rootkit. They are some games that don't fit in between, which usually the compatibility mode with true Admin access will make them work.

 

windows 7 profession has an XP compatibility mode - you should upgrade to the 64 bit professional edition

 

No. "XP Mode" (XP Virtual environment running above Win7) is for APPLICATIONS not games. It can't do OpenGL nor DirectX. If you have old DOS games, you better use DOSBox (free - there are also free UI tools found on the same site, to create easy to run games from your desktop... double click it will load and configure DOSBox for you and run it, all for you, in one shot).

 

I have never had any problems running games in vista 64 bit.

 

i would personally recommend that u get windows 7 64 bit... it's way faster than 32 bit and the extra RAM does help if u have more than 4GB RAM.... i have no problems playing any games... even those as old as from 2000...

 

I agree, it does feel snappier, but if you do go 64bit make sure you have more than 2gb of RAM. 64bit applications use more RAM. All I have open is firefox and one explorer window open and it's using about 1.7gb, though firefox is a serious memory hog.

 

I installed the Farcry 1 fine , but the latest update is not 64bit compatible ???

 

I have not had a single issue with any games using Vista 64 bit or Windows 7 64 bit. These are the games I've played successfully, off the top of my head:

• all Source engine games (Half-Life 2, both Episodes, Portal, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, HL2 Deathmatch, Garry's Mod 10)
• all GoldSrc engine games (Half-Life, the Blue Shift and Opposing Force expansions, Counter-Strike 1.6, Team Fortress Classic, Ricochet)
• all Medal of Honor PC games (Allied Assault, Breakthrough and Spearhead expansions, Pacific Assault, Airborne)
• all Call of Duty PC games (Call of Duty, United Offensive, CoD2, CoD4:MW, CoD:W@W, CoD: MW2)
• Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 for Windows
• Battlefield 2 and all expansions/boosters
• Star Wars Jedi Knight III: Jedi Academy
• Star Wars Battlefront II
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky
• Mirror's Edge
• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (with Bloodmoon and Tribunal expansions)
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (with Knights of the Nine, Shivering Isles expansions and all other DLC)
• Guild Wars
• all Unreal games (Unreal Gold, Unreal II: The Awakening, Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2004, Unreal Tournament 3)
• Rome: Total War (with Barbarian Invasion and Alexander expansions)
• Age of Empires II (with Age of Kings expansion)
• Fallout 3
• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto IV
• Far Cry and Far Cry 2
• Crysis and Crysis Warhead

To this day, I have not come across a single game compatibility issue with Vista or 7 64-bit.

 

I have Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit. CoD MW2, NFS:S, Prototype, and L4D2 work perfectly fine.

 

Newer games (previous 5-7 years) by and large run just fine. You only get into issues with reeeally old Windows games. I couldn't get Dungeon Keeper (a 1997 game) to run at all on 64-bit, but it ran just fine on 32-bit. I've heard that the games No One Lives Forever, Fallout 2, and Grim Fandango also won't run in 64-bit. Also, games built on the SCUMM engine (Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, the old Secret of Monkey Island) won't run, but you can get around this by using SCUMMVM.

But the list of games that run on 32-bit Windows 7 and not 64-bit Windows 7, and don't have a work-around for running on 64-bit W7, is probably very short.

 

32-bit Windows 7 (or Vista in comparison to Vista 64-bit), memory consuption should be the same. The high amount of memory consumption is due that not only the OS memory management uses your RAM first, once full or near full it starts using your pagefile on your HDD. In XP, people think that "XP uses less memory", but in reality it's because no mater how much RAM you have it acts if you are low in memory, all the time. Meaning, it dumps everything it can on the pagefile to reduce memory consumption. Remember that Windows XP was designed for 64, 128, 256 MB of RAM.. not 2GB - which also was the same behavior of previous Windows.

Also, you need to add SuperFetch technology, a technology that pre-loads your program before you do, so that they can start from 2 to 6 times faster (time varies depending on the program). It does this by watching your habit. For instance, if you run Firefox everyday at 9 in the morning, than just before, it will load Firefox into the memory. So the only thing that will require to load when you launch it, is load anything that needs to be loaded from the HDD. Now Windows, doesn't know what program you run per say... it just watches the memory and sees what is in common and uses that.

Now, YES 64-bit version of Windows consumes more memory.. but not by much... I estimate 100MB more, as it requires to load Windows On Windows (SysWOW64), which loads 32-bit libraries files for your 32-bit software.

Everything you mentioned are all software and engines made in part or fully made in 16-bit. 32-bit Windows features 16-bit backward compatibility. Windows 64-bit dropped support of 16-bit software in favor of WOW (Windows On Windows) technology, so that 32-bit software don't have any impact of any shape or kind, during execution. Which in my opinion, is very smart, as it makes the transition to 64-bit OS with near zero impact (ie: only very very old software/games which represent a nitch market share, which can be emulated in ANY CASE with virtual environment (in many cases) such as DOSBox, which is free).

 

Err..............running vista 64 here...................no problems !

 

How many tabs?

And are you running a clean install or upgrade?

 

+1 for this.

 

A game that hates anything apart from XP: Scarface-The World is Yours.

 

There shouldn't really be any cases where a game works in Vista/Win7 32bit but not 64-bit (bar one or two exceptional cases), the OS itself is the same. The causes of issuses with legacy games (such a DirectSound issues) would apply to both versions. In addition, Vista SP2/Win7 fixed most of the compatibility issues I had, most notably Metal Gear Solid 2.

The exception is any game that uses a 16-bit installer, such as Red Alert or Future Cop LAPD. However, I managed to get Future Cop working by copying the game files from the disc directly.

Driver issues aren't even a problem in XP 64-bit these days, but it's even less of a problem with Vista/Win7 64-bit because devs have to submit both 32 and 64-bit versions of a driver to get WHQL certification.

I'd say the ability to use 4GB+ of address space, plus the ability to use 64-bit applications, outweighs the negatives of one or two potential issues. I have 4GB of main RAM and 1GB of Video RAM - I'd loose an entire GB if I stuck with 32-bit.

 

I'm using windows 7 x64 server, and even it runs pretty much everything without compatibility issues.

Left 4 Dead 2, Battlefield 2, World in Conflict, Red Alert 3, Modern Warfare 2, Grand Theft Auto 4... just to name a few.

 

On W7 memory usage and prefetch.. When I boot my machine cold and let it get to the desktop, after ~2 or 3 minutes idle, it's using ~1.6-1.7 gigs of ram.

Now, when I open up thunderbird, google chrome, steam, iTunes and hwmonitor? Guess what, it's still barely using 2, usually closer to 1.8.

Prefetch in action!

 

Are DirectX libraries available in 64-bit? I don't know why more game devs aren't making 64-bit games, but using a 64-bit OS is a no-brainer, it's future-proof.

@Explosiv: you haven't saved any memory, you've just told Windows to reserve some mem at startup for running some specific apps. The advantage of prefetch isn't memory usage, but rather when you use it.

 

That was my point, high idle memory usage was really windows preparing to open all of my regular apps that I open shortly after startup.

And I bet the reason devs often default to 32 bit is for those who still have a 32 bit OS (for whatever unfathomable reason). You can run a 32 bit app in a 64 bit environment, but not vice versa.

 

DirectX has been packaged with the 64-bit binaries since 2005. It's purely because of the amount of people that still religiously stick to 32-bit operating systems. And with all of the unfounded negativity that has been thrown towards 64-bit operating systems over the years, who can blame them?

 

Until Microsoft releases a 64 bit "ONLY" OS, developers will still make games that use 32 bit libraries.
Usually games work pretty well in Windows 7 x64 as long as it use a 16 bit installer or some kind of lame CD protection program thats not updated to work with newer OS.

 

I can!!