The earliest commercially released game I can remember being Win64 only is Fray and that flopped big time in 2012 (27/100 on metacritic...OUCH) and that gam'es not even available to buy anymore (nor is it even playable after even one year of release). I'm sure there was something earlier though

Jorpho wrote:

I don't know how you're measuring that. Right now on my computer, Task Manager indicates that Steam.exe is taking up 85,000K (i.e. in the "Private Wroking Set" column), and I have close to 1200 games. (Not that I would expect the number of games to make the slightest bit of difference in its memory footprint. Why the heck would it?)

Even if you include the three "steamwebhelper.exe" processes, those still take up less than 100,000K total.

when browsing the libary tab on steam, check it with yours with task manager you should find a massive memory spike

I never actually used XP 64, it was released to late, like 1 year before Vista...
and for gaming, before Vista, I don't think anyone was running more than 4GB anyway.

so I don't think it was at all that much of a relevant OS, specially not for gaming

I use XP64 on my main PC. I haven't run into any problems with it, it works just as well as XP32 does. I have a dual boot with XP32 but I haven't had any need to fall back on that at all and wouldn't mind deleting it at this point. I like XP, but I don't see the point of running the x86 version if the system supports x64 and it works just as well. 😀
Unless you're trying to use a really specialized or anachronistic piece of hardware then finding drivers shouldn't be any problem. As far as I've been able to tell, any mass market device that was supported during the life of XP64/2k3 has drivers for it.
I haven't run into any XP32 software that breaks on XP64, but I'm aware that old 16-bit apps/installers aren't going to work. I would assume that anything affected by the 16bit issue falls into the stated category of "runs fine on a P3 with Win98".

Programs that have an x64 version can potentially run faster and it can access GPT drives, though sadly it can't boot from them.

The only strange thing I've run into is that for some reason, on XP64 the tooltips for the taskbar icons are very prone to dropping behind the taskbar instead of being displayed in front of it. It happens way more frequently than with XP32. This isn't nearly important enough to affect my opinion of the OS, but it's a strange annoyance.

The only other problem I've run into is once or twice I forgot what OS I was running and tried to install the wrong driver, which of course led to nonfunctional hardware. User error, easily corrected when I realized my mistake.

candle_86 wrote:

Jorpho wrote:

I don't know how you're measuring that. Right now on my computer, Task Manager indicates that Steam.exe is taking up 85,000K (i.e. in the "Private Wroking Set" column), and I have close to 1200 games. (Not that I would expect the number of games to make the slightest bit of difference in its memory footprint. Why the heck would it?)

Even if you include the three "steamwebhelper.exe" processes, those still take up less than 100,000K total.

when browsing the libary tab on steam, check it with yours with task manager you should find a massive memory spike

No, that is not happening. RAM usage remains mostly constant. Again: why would it change? Nothing at all intensive happens when you start browsing your library.

Besides, if Steam suddenly decided to try allocating a whole 1 GB of RAM as soon as someone tried to browse a library, the whole system would grind to a halt. You'd hear users everywhere screaming that Steam was a pile of crap.

SPBHM wrote:

so I don't think it was at all that much of a relevant OS, specially not for gaming

Not for end-users no. But for developers it was a good OS to port their applications and drivers to 64-bit and do a good test-run to debug any 64-bit related issues.
The fact that XP x64 was there is probably the reason why Vista x64 and later OSes had a relatively painless uptake.

Scali wrote:

Not for end-users no. But for developers it was a good OS to port their applications and drivers to 64-bit and do a good test-run to debug any 64-bit related issues.
The fact that XP x64 was there is probably the reason why Vista x64 and later OSes had a relatively painless uptake.

That is one possible explanation, but I am not completely sure it is the most accurate.

1. I don't know how many developers actually used XP x64 to develop / test their software. My impression was that not so many. There was only about a year and a half between XP x64 release and Vista's release. Even after Vista was released, most SW developers focused on 32-bit software (drivers excluded). Where I worked we focused on XP, then gradually moved to Vista/7. For the latter, both 32 and 64-bit versions were targeted, but I don't recall us ever targeting or ever testing anything on XP 64-bit.
2. I would say that the reason Vista x64 was relatively painless for apps was mostly because Microsoft implemented Wow64 and did it well. When I first installed my VIsta x64 (and that was quite late, in 2008, after SP1), about 90% of the applications I used were still 32-bit editions only.
3. I would not call Vista x64 painless when it came to drivers. It was quite painful in the beginning (though it's hard to say how much of that was due to x64, and how much was due to the differences in the kernel / driver models. Vista's reputation clearly shows it was far from painless. If anything, lessons learned during Vista made Win7 relatively painless.

I will stand by my opinion on XP x64 (which you called 'lies'). To say that it was a doomed branch does not mean that it was not good, or that I hate it; merely that it was not very useful then, and not very useful now (although in some particular cases it may be actually more useful now than back then).

It was released in 2005, almost 4 years after the x86 version (don't confuse with the IA64 variant, which existed pretty much from the beginning). Vista was already well into development, and it was obvious that XP x64 is going nowhere. One could call it a stop-gap solution, but it did not even meet any actual need. How many users had 4GB of RAM back then? How many useful 64bit apps were around (and not just something compiled in 64-bit for the sake of itself)? It could be used for test-runs, as you suggested, except I did not get the impression it was actually used much for this. That is why I called it "more of a proof-of-concept thing".

dr_st wrote:

I don't know how many developers actually used XP x64 to develop / test their software. My impression was that not so many. There was only about a year and a half between XP x64 release and Vista's release. Even after Vista was released, most SW developers focused on 32-bit software (drivers excluded). Where I worked we focused on XP, then gradually moved to Vista/7. For the latter, both 32 and 64-bit versions were targeted, but I don't recall us ever targeting or ever testing anything on XP 64-bit.

The critical points were mainly drivers and things like Explorer plugins.
You HAD to have 64-bit drivers for a 64-bit OS. 32-bit applications would generally run fine.

dr_st wrote:

I would say that the reason Vista x64 was relatively painless for apps was mostly because Microsoft implemented Wow64 and did it well. When I first installed my VIsta x64 (and that was quite late, in 2008, after SP1), about 90% of the applications I used were still 32-bit editions only.

WoW64 is *way* older than Vista. It was originally developed for the Alpha version of Windows NT, to run x86 processes.
XP x64 also has WoW64, and runs both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows processes just fine, no different from Vista or later versions of Windows.

dr_st wrote:

I will stand by my opinion on XP x64 (which you called 'lies'). To say that it was a doomed branch does not mean that it was not good, or that I hate it; merely that it was not very useful then, and not very useful now (although in some particular cases it may be actually more useful now than back then).

You specifically said: "It was more a proof-of-concept thing than an OS designed to actually be used".
That is the part I consider to be a lie.
Note also that there was some delay because initially Intel and AMD could not agree on a common x64 standard. So while MS had most of x64 ready before then, they didn't want to release it until there was a single standard that both vendors would adhere to.

Scali wrote:

WoW64 is *way* older than Vista. It was originally developed for the Alpha version of Windows NT, to run x86 processes.
XP x64 also has WoW64, and runs both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows processes just fine, no different from Vista or later versions of Windows.

Yes. It is just that Vista was the first Windows OS that had a non-negligible 64-bit client base.

Scali wrote:

You specifically said: "It was more a proof-of-concept thing than an OS designed to actually be used".
That is the part I consider to be a lie.

Alright, so substitute "designed" with "intended" / "expected".

dr_st wrote:

Yes. It is just that Vista was the first Windows OS that had a non-negligible 64-bit client base.

if you only look at consumers, where 64-bit was not much of a desirable feature.
The technology however was developed for servers and workstations, and they had adopted 64-bit OSes long before x86 even had 64-bit extensions.
They adopted the x64 version of Windows Server on a large scale as soon as it became available.

I mean, let's face facts here... Microsoft only released an XP Pro version in x64 flavour. This is meant for office/professional use. Regular customers would generally use Home (previously the Win9x range as opposed to NT/2000).

Scali wrote:

if you only look at consumers

No. If you look not only at a particular handpicked selection of users (e.g., servers/workstations that run Windows).

Averaging everything out, it was still negligible.

Scali wrote:

They adopted the x64 version of Windows Server on a large scale as soon as it became available.

Which was when? In 2005? See above comment about being late to the game.

P.S. Do you actually have data about adoption rates?

dr_st wrote:

Scali wrote:

if you only look at consumers

No. If you look not only at a particular handpicked selection of users (e.g., servers/workstations that run Windows).

Averaging everything out, it was still negligible.

No, I think you need to look at the ratio of x86 vs x64 per edition of Windows. The server version was definitely built for serious 64-bit use. The same technology was just shared with XP x64. So that technology was 'serious', even in XP x64, even though the market for XP x64 was rather limited.

To simplify my position, and what I personally would propose as the takeaway for choosing between XP32 and XP64:
XP64 will run the same games/programs as XP32, with the addition of x64 support, and with the removal of 16-bit support. It's a good trade for an XP system that runs newer applications, but could be a bad trade if you're using XP to run very old applications or games that still need 16-bit.

Can yall think of any games that wont work on xp 64 that need more than my p3 to be playable?

I'd be interested to hear about this also.
I know people have said before that Fallout 3 needs XP to run reliably. I don't know if that means XP32 only or if it works equally well on XP64. I've installed it on XP64 but I haven't played it long on that machine.