Probably a daft question. Will 32 bit applications run with the 64bit XP operating system or do you stick with 32 bit XP Pro until the next generation of FS?RegardsHoward

This is only my educated guess but I am almost certain you will be able to get 64-bit Athlon machine, install your 32-bit XP Pro and FS2004 and everything will run ok.Michael J.http://www.reality-xp.com/community/nr/rsc/rxp-higher.jpg

I am not sure that is the case. At least in Apple's new G5 64-bit processor requires OS X to be completly rewritten to work in a 64-bit environment. In addition, all the software has to be 64-bit compatible as well. It will be real interesting to see how everything pasn out on the PC side.Take care,-CJ

The AMD 64-bit CPU's are fully backwards compatible to 32-bit instructions. Actually, these 64-bit CPU's are capable of whooping P4's in a native 32-bit environment. They run in XP without no problem at all, but within a 64-bit environment they would really fly because of the CPU's extra capabilites (such as extra registers and other stuff).

Apart from full back compatibility, the Athlon64 combined with the nForce3 chipset really kicked Intel CPUs in the teeth:http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1856Cheers,Paulhttp://www.strontiumdog.plus.com/sbird.jpgOfficially licenced by British Airways plc for use of name and logo[p]AMD XP2800+ Barton, Gigabyte GA-7NNXP nForce2, 1Gig Crucial PC3200 DDR 400MHz, Gainward 128 MB GF4-4200, SB Audigy, 3 x WD Caviar SE[/p]

This is from a Half Life 2 developer:"A: Hyperthreaded CPUs attempt to extract thread-level parallelism, as opposed to traditional pipelined architectures which attempt to take advantage of instruction level parallelism. Hyperthreading can be somewhat unpredictable in terms of the performance impact, as you can, in some cases, run slower.Implementing and maintaining a "deeply" multi-threaded version of Source would be a pain (i.e. multi-threading the renderer). Implementing a hacky version (e.g. having a discreet physics thread or running the client and server in different threads) is something we may do depending upon how much bandwidth we have before we ship. Right now we don't get nearly as much bang for the buck working on hyperthreading as we do on other optimizations. That may change as we run out of things to optimize.64-bits, in contrast, is a one-time cost and is fairly simple to take advantage of. It's a huge win for tools as it not only gets more work done per instruction, but it also gets us past the current memory limitations, which are a problem for us today on tools.Distributed computing is harder than hyperthreading but it has the potential to increase performance by a huge amount (8X on our tools) as opposed to hyperthreading (30%). All of our tools are going to a distributed approach.So the taxonomy looks like this:- general algorithmic optimization (general good thing to do)- DX9 optimization (big gains, long term direction)- 64-bits (not that hard, solves memory problem as well as performance gains)- hyperthreading (hard initial cost, on-going code maintainence cost, limited unpredictable performance gains, benefits in multiprocessor environments as well)- distributed computing (hardest to do, biggest potential gains, great for tools, may be great for servers, not sure how it works with clients)."Basically he's saying that it's more worth it to them to optimize their games for multiple processors (the sort of environment Opteron was made for) than to optimize for hyperthreading. The results with HT just aren't reliable enough. 64Bit likewise has the same advantage of relatively easy implementation and good benefit. Once Microsoft finalizes their 64bit Windows OS we'll really see what the new 64bit Athlons can do.

This is all very interesting. Originally I thought that HT will be a big benefit for the FS9 only to be severly disappointed. So maybe 64-bit will fare better. We have to watch now for the Intel's Prescot - AMD's Athlon-64 duel with great interest. It is going to be really interesting next 90 days or so.Michael J.

Sorry guys,The question I was really asking is can FS9 run with the Windows XP 64 Operating system?Howard

Hi Guys,It is great to hear that the 64-bit processors are going to be backward compatible with everything. It would be quite expensive to have to go out an buy 64-bit software. I will be real interesting to see to benchmarks when they first start to come out.Take care,-CJ

Windows XP 64bit is built for the new AMD 32/64 bit offerings, so it'll of course run both 32bit and 64bit software. There are some 64but CPU's that don't run in 32 bit mode, such as Intel's Itanium. But no home user would have need for such a system.

Those are VERY interesting benchmarks. I will be looking to replace my current PC in the near future, and I would love to see the AMD Athlon 64 emerge as the "top dog". I have been impressed with AMD's commitment to producing innovative and elegant solutions for processor performance, and the Athlon 64 looks like another great addition to that list. Let's hope that the performance of retail kit will live up to these impressive statistics.Chris Low,ENGLAND.

>The question I was really asking is can FS9 run with the>Windows XP 64 Operating system?>Not sure what in this question is different than what we have been discussing above. The implication is that on a platform like Athlon-64 makes no difference how many "bits" is your application or OS (64 or 32).Michael J.