x64: It's Lonely Out Here (But I Feel Powerful)

Published 07 April 05 08:24 AM | tristank 

No TV. Latest casualty: DVICO FusionHD DVB-T card. No XP64 drivers now (and not for a while, at least). So I'm taking it out and lending it to a friend indefinitely. I built a (32 bit) Media Center PC the other week, so it's not a total loss, I can still watch recorded shows...

There seems to be a good amount of gaming community buzz around AMD64 systems and WinXP x64, but the driver situation is reminiscent of the Windows 2000 situation - few drivers, little perceived market penetration to date, and little to be gained by the migration for your average gamer right now (eg, it's week one, give it a little time). I'm not average, I'm a superb gamer, thank you.

As an example: I was going to buy Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory ($AUD80) and Pandora Tomorrow ($AUD30) today, but backed away after vaguely remembering that I'd heard the copy protection scheme for CT used a 32 bit driver, so I can't run it. The demo runs really nicely, though - perhaps they'll release an x64-compatible patch...

I'm also missing PasteOff, and other silly little .Net utilities that I built with VS 2003, as there's no Framework installed yet. I could install .Net 2.0 Beta 1, but I'm convinced that the .Net Framework Beta 2 is due sometime soon, so I don't want to waste 30% of my precious 10 gig per month downloading and installing an earlier (say, CTP) build, only to have it superseded by the "real" beta with the go-live license on the day (and most likely, the hour) I succumb. I can live without it for another month. Or I could try rewriting it in "real man's" Java. :)

One other oddity: my tooltips are appearing behind the taskbar, unless I disable "Always on top" for it. Not sure if this is an Nvidia driver thing yet.

Back to the MCE for some late night TV...

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Comments

# Scott said on April 7, 2005 2:03 PM:
I've been thinking about going 64 bits too, but I'm worried abouth what I'll have to give up, so this post was more food for thought .. :)
# tristank said on April 7, 2005 6:14 PM:
Yeah, it's in a bit of an odd place at the moment, but it's only going to get better from here.

On the plus side, doing day-to-day things seems noticeably faster... just need to wait for stronger game support before I'm happier.
# Nathan said on April 10, 2005 1:57 PM:
About the tooltips appearing behind the taskbar, this is something that I'm suffering from as well - but unless you were refering to nVidia mobo drivers it ain't a mobo problem. Because I have ATI ones. Are you using build 1433?
# tristank said on April 11, 2005 7:31 PM:
I'm using an Nforce 4 A8N-SLI with a 6600GT, so I have both the motherboard drivers and video drivers installed.

I noticed it wasn't a problem before launching a Direct3D game, it only seems to happen afterwards (eg, from bootup, it's good).
# tristank said on April 11, 2005 7:33 PM:
Using RTM build.
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