Gaming Downsides to 32-bit?

I'm going out tomorrow to get a copy of Vista Basic 32-bit for my Mac, and wanted to know if some games require 64-bit versions, or if 32-bit will work well with everything. I'm pretty sure 32 is fine, but just need confirmation.

 

32-bit is perfectly OK.

 

For the time being, there's no down side.

Until games start requiring more than 2^32 bits of memory address (technically, closer to 2^31 bits), games won't be hampered by 32Bit OS's.

 

if you can get home premium
---------------------------------
Hp Pavilion dv9640us entertainment pc
Microsoft Vista Home Premium x86
Intel Core 2 Duo T5250 (1.5Ghz) 667 FSB
nVidia GeForce 8600M GS (256MB Dedicated) w\Turbo Cache
(2x 1) Seagate Hard Drive 120Gb
Hyundai 2 GB of Ram
Intel PM965 Northbridge

 

what? home premium is necessary for games? The only use I have for windows is games, as 99% of the Games for Windows line will never make it to OS X. For every-day apps I plan to use OS X, so I don't need any fancy stuff from windows, other than the ability to play games.

 

No, don't worry about what he said... He's not making sense.

Home Premium is about the worst OS you can get for gaming right now.

Either go with XP (extra performance) or Vista Basic, since it doesn't contain as much of the background lag-ware that Home Premium would contain (e.g.: No Aero).

 

Aero is turned off when running a full screen app. Sorry to break another invalid anti-vista argument

And since RAM/Cache works differently, can't compare ressource usage.

In fact, the more memory Vista uses, the more it's performant

 

Well, I can't find a store with XP, and I need Windows before Christmas, and Basic is the cheapest one, which apparently should fit my needs just fine. Just curious, what exactly is Aero anyway?

 

Aero is the visual theme Microsoft created to rival the OS X look. It looks good but hogs resources like mad.

 

it does hog resources, but it won't matter since you have a very very fast computer.

if you want vista, get vista home premium, home basic is ultra crippled.

ideally, you should find a way to get windows xp pro.

 

Have you benchmarked it? I've seen a few tests showing a noticeable performance in (fullscreen) games depending on whether Aero was enabled or disabled globally. Perhaps Microsoft has fixed that since then. But worth testing at least, before you call the argument invalid.

Sure you can.
Vista does use more memory for its own core services. The difference is that Vista also caches recently used files in RAM, but we can ignore that and look at how much memory it actually *uses*. And Vista uses a lot more there.
It also forces games themselves to use more memory due to the funky Vista version of DX9.

The combination of this has caused a few games to crash occasionally with out-of-memory excptions. Under XP they're fine, but on Vista they just manage to creep above 2GB RAM, and then they die.

That statement is so simplified it's meaningless.
Vista uses available memory to cache files, yes, and the more it does that, the more files it can open quickly.
And when Vista isn't forced to swap out data to the pagefile, it obviously also runs faster. So in that sense, yes, you're right.

In the common everyday sense, no, Vista performs the same.

 

Thanks for the replies. So home basic will make games run slower than premium, masterchef?

 

Isn't it supposed to be the other way round? Reason being Basic ships with the fewest features of the retail windows family so there are fewer memory-using functions and programs running in the background.

 

I highly doubt you'll notice a difference either way. I think the point was just that more expensive versions of Vista come with more extra features that *may* slow down the system. (But on the whole, I doubt it'll affect more than boot time)

 

Alright, thanks a lot of the info.

 

True; You can't compare how vista and xp are managing their memory.

And by the way;

Québec City; Yeah!