Curse

Drylnn · May 07, 2005, 10:12 AM // 10:12

I know that Guild Wars does not officially support 64-bit Windows, but there's "We don't officially support it, but it probably will work" and "It has no chance of working" and "Oh my god, it crashed and took down my whole computer with it"

I guess I was wondering if anyone had any success or failure stories running Guild Wars on Windows 64. I was looking forward to upgrading, but I won't give up my precioussssss Guild Wars, and MS doesn't want people dualbooting 32 and 64 (nor would I ever want to either)

Tempest · May 07, 2005, 01:54 PM // 13:54

As soon as the trial version of XP 64 bit arrives from MS I'm going to give it a try.

*If* runs in the 32 bit mode emulation and will largely depend on how good the video card drivers / other hardware drivers to see if the 64 bit windows subsystem (memory, cpu, misc) boosts will make this actually faster.

If they come out with a 64 bit version you should see a performance boost.

I'm going to re-partion my hd in two drives, but xp on one, then install clean copy of xp64bit trial in the 2nd one partion.

swaaye · May 07, 2005, 04:46 PM // 16:46

It seems to work perfectly.

I have a eMachines 6805 A64 notebook with a Radeon 9600 running XP x64. It runs just as well as XP Home as far as I can tell (I dual boot). I only played it for a moment though. Sound and graphics were fine. Networking seemed ok.

Pharoke · May 07, 2005, 06:03 PM // 18:03

I had the tester of XP 64 and while running 3 different benchmarks at the same time it heaved all over itself and wouldn't boot back up. Also, check out Hardocp.com. They have a comparison of XP 64bit vs XP 32bit and there are no real gaming differences.

swaaye · May 07, 2005, 09:04 PM // 21:04

Well, there are no differences RIGHT NOW because everything is compiled for 32-bit Windows (Win32). So, basically, you're seeing that MS's support of 32-bit softwars in Windows x64 just totally rocks and is nearly transparent.

If games start taking advantage of the additional CPU registers that AMD64/EMT64 offers you better believe they will be a bit faster. Epic said this about UT2003 when they compiled it for Linux AMD64 way back a couple of years ago.

It's just that x64 software is not going to show up fast cuz there's not enough of an audience for it to be worth the effort.

Drivers for x64 are pretty quirky yet though. My touchpad doesn't quite work right (touchpad mouse wheel doodad doesn't work in IE or Firefox). And audio drivers are skippy sometimes.

Drylnn · May 09, 2005, 09:17 AM // 09:17

For a status update:

So far, Windows 64-bit and Guild Wars are playing nice together. I had some lag problems on the Ice Caves of Sorrow mission, but I'm not certain it wasn't a) a pile of downloads b) a video card issue since my vid card was wonky even before Windows 64. I'll try to establish what the issue was with that.

In the meantime, it looks fine and runs fine on my Radeon 9700 with the above caveats. If anyone has any questions or trepidation about moving up to Win64 and keeping Guild Wars, feel free to contact me here.

Frostie · May 09, 2005, 01:13 PM // 13:13

I'm running Windows 64 beta 4, and it runs fine.

Mashu · Jun 03, 2005, 10:59 PM // 22:59

I am using x64 final OEM and it runs OK for me but not perfect, my CPU seems to get raped by the "System" process while playing this game, so half my CPU goes to the "System" and half my CPU goes to "Guild Wars", and before you say thats the 32-bit emulation kicking in, it actually is not I believe, because when I have been playing Half-Life and Unreal Tournament and all the CPU (100%) goes to these games, but those two games are OpenGL and I have yet to test another DirectX application. I will probably try Half-Life 2 later on and probably post back what happends, but if all of the CPU goes the HL2 app and none to the system, then theres something wrong with Guild Wars, although there is nothing we can do about it because the developers do not support x64 yet.

Anyone else's "System" process getting a massive amount of CPU usage too while playing this?

Sayshina · Nov 26, 2005, 01:56 AM // 01:56

As I understand how they implemented the 64 bit windows, there shouldn't be any "emulation" issues at all.

This not like when the went from 8/16 bit DOS to 16/32 bit windows. Nobody ever dreamed DOS would hang around as long as it did, and there were some pretty wacky work arounds that didn't play nice with each other. The replacement, Win 95, wasn't exactly stable to begin with, and trying to emulate the various types of ram that the old DOS games expected caused a lot of headaches.

In this case, we've been totaly legacy free since XP. That leaves a pretty straightforward port from 32 bit to 64 bit, with support for the extra registers being what all the fuss was about.

Win 64 doesn't have to emulate XP, for the most part it IS XP. The drivers need to be rewritten, and will most likely be pretty buggy for the next year or so. I don't see any vendors putting real cash into 64 bit driver optimization any time soon.

Why pat microsoft on the back? By all accounts, they didn't do all that much, and it's the guys writing the drivers that have the hard task anyway.

With games, I hear the same rumors I've heard during every other platform switch, game A, B, and C work flawlessly, game D has some odd behavior that almost always comes down to a driver incompatibility, and game E never works, even a couple of years later when the new platform is now standard.

unamed player · Nov 26, 2005, 02:53 AM // 02:53

I think someones trolling all the old forum posts to make you look like a moron:P

I just totally bashed an old IWAY thread yesterday. Then some guy comes in and laughs at me for getting so worked up on an old thread:P

EternalTempest · Nov 26, 2005, 03:35 AM // 03:35

Windows XP 64 bit is a been very well done by MS, imho.
I was running the trial version of xp 64 bit and was very impressed on how they implemented it. If the program ran fine, it ran at near identical speed then xp 32 bit. The only area is drivers which have to catch up.

How they implemented it was impressive. 32 bit code emulation almost has direct access to the hardware just as 64bit. I suspect Windows Vista will be done in the same way. Vista is coming in 32bit and 64bit versions. Ms has announced the next OS (after Vista) will be 64 bit only.