x64 XP - Bastard Child of OSes?

[zsouthboy]

Before we even were able to buy our fancy Athlon 64s, we had known it was coming, it was going to be big, there was a huge marketing effort on AMD and microsoft's part, etc. etc.

Now it's like it never even happened.


I know the driver thing is a pain - but we're moving this way as an industry, so you'd better get it started in that direction anyway.


Is x64 Vista going to get any install base, either?

I'm not pretending to care about 4GB+ memory on the home side of things, I just know that there are other benefits to say, gaming, in 64 bit mode (registers, etc).

 

[karlotta]

Before we even were able to buy our fancy Athlon 64s, we had known it was coming, it was going to be big, there was a huge marketing effort on AMD and microsoft's part, etc. etc.

Now it's like it never even happened.


I know the driver thing is a pain - but we're moving this way as an industry, so you'd better get it started in that direction anyway.


Is x64 Vista going to get any install base, either?

I'm not pretending to care about 4GB+ memory on the home side of things, I just know thatthere are other benefits to say, gaming, in 64 bit mode (registers, etc).

two little companys named Dell and Intel kinda took the wind out of the desktop side of x64, and then the rush to Vista, which has many flavores all but killed it for the home/pro Xp crowd to get good driver/game support ect ect... And i would say we are not moving to x64 as industry for desktop, the server world is there and the workstation lands are waiting for quad core to leverage the x64...

 

[swaaye]

Gaming performance is far better served with a faster GPU than a 5% boost in CPU performance thru a custom compile.

 

[hoom]

That & most performance tests show little to no advantage in using x64, even performance decreases due to increased bandwidth utilisation & some functional units being only able to do one 64bit op where it can do 2*32bit.

Me I got XP X64 because damnit if I'm going to have a 64bit capable CPU I might as well actually use the functionality & I am happy enough with it.

Only real problem is that I can't get Iwar to run with Zeckensacks Glide Wrapper
(why oh why is there no 16bit support, my understanding of A64 architecture is that this is some arbritrary M$ restriction, same with the requirement for 64bit native drivers, the new Mac OS is supposedly going to be able to handle 32bit drivers ok)

Nvidia never made official nforce3 drivers but the betas are stable enough (I don't actually remember having XP x64 having ever bluescreened on me)
Managed to get around lack of manufacturer supplied WLAN card drivers by tracking down x64 drivers supplied by the chipmaker Atheros (long & frustrating search but eventually successful)

 

[Maintank]

They probably used it more for a test platform than anything else. In the end I am sure the costs of maintaining and truely developing for an x64 extended version of XP outweighed the benefits. Instead they worked on Vista and made it 64bit capable from the ground up.

btw I still think Windows ME takes the cake in the bastard child dept, emphasis on bastard.

 

[Colourless]

Well Microsofts Games For Windows scheme requires that any game badged as under the 'Games for Windows' logo WILL work under Vista x64, don't think it requires 64 bit compiles though. My experience with XP x64 has been good. I don't have any exotic hardware thought I do kind of lack a PRINTER DRIVER!

Seeing the posts about NF3 I'm am just curious, XP x64 came with drivers for NF3 250 and that's what I'm using. Doesn't it have drivers for the older revisions?

The reason for no 32 bit drivers would be so the kernel doesn't have to do Thunking when accessing drivers as well as jumps between code segments (welcome to Windows 9x!). Since the kernel at the moment doesn't thunk it would require a significant rewrite for a feature that would add some initial flexibility, could end up making the OS unstable, will make it slower, as well as just in general cause problems for 32 bit drivers on systems with more than 3GB of physical memory. Is it a good trade off or not? Biggest advantage with 64 bit is bigger address space so why would we want to cripple the systems by using 32 bit drivers?

Just a note the 16 bit restriction is not just a windows restriction it's also an architechture problem. NTVDM uses Virtual x86 mode. It's not possble to switch from switch from Long Mode into Virtual x86 Mode. Compatibility mode in AMD64 supports 16 Bit Protected Mode but that is not the same as Virtual x86. Of course MS could rewrite NTVDM to use 16 Bit Protected mode instead of Virtual x86, but it would only be useful for some Win3.1 apps that only used Win16 and would not work with any DOS ones.