Any good games ported to Win64 or 64 SUSE?

[Daniel ~]

I'm trying to decide how to set up my gear for an exploratory incursion into SUSE 9.1 which happens to come in both 32 and 64 bit!

How tough is software and games going to be if I choose either 64 bit option.

[Áedán]

Broadly speaking, the 64bit version should run 32bit applications happily.

[Daniel ~]

This is truly excellent news! Thank you Aidan.

[Áedán]

It would suck as much as Itanium if it couldn't run 32bit apps. The fact that the processor can seamlessly run 32bit and 64bit applications side by side is one of AMD's biggest selling points!

Note the word 'applications' however. Drivers are a different matter, they all have to be 64bit for a 64bit OS.

[Daniel ~]

In your opinion, generally speaking in terms or the next year or so, would one have an easier time finding drivers for

A. Linux 32
b. Linux 64
c. Win 64

What's your best guess as far as how long it will take to get parity in driver releases between 32 and 64 bit OSs?

Thanks A.!

[Áedán]

32bit and 64bit linux is actually very similar. Linux has tried to use the same codebase for both, so the code for a 32bit driver should be the same (or very similar to) code for a 64bit driver. This is mainly due to the open source nature, and the fact that people have 64bit platforms already.

64bit Windows is going to take a bit longer, as you have to wait for a manufacturer to release 64bit drivers. Some manufacturers have been very good with this, such as nVidia. Others have been the opposite, and claimed they have no plans to write 64bit drivers.

[Daniel ~]

So all and all this is good news for those wishing to try and use Linux. Where would one look for pitfalls, where am I as a beginner likely to run into trouble?

[Áedán]

I'm not the best person to ask on that front I'm afraid. I spent a lot of time chanting magic incantations at the alter of the CLI. It goes for installations too - if it can't be done in text mode, then it's not worth doing. I hate handholding GUI intefaces with wizards, because the wizard invariable won't let me do what I want to do!

[Daniel ~]

Thank you Aidan I know if I just keep posting here someone will come along and tell me how great Far Cry runs on their Linux 64 setup, I just know it! ":O}

[stigweed]

I'm guessing Suse 9.1 should probably do a basic graphical install pretty easily, being a major distro. Further tweaking may be required though.

As for drivers, I don't know about 64bit, but Far Cry on my Rad9700 is never going to happen - the Ati drivers for linux are a joke, they only support XF86, which most distributions have ditched in favour of xorg's license. It's possible to get it working but I've not managed it. Even when that succeeds (I had their drivers working back on fedora core1) the performance of the driver is poor at best compared to windows. I don't know about Nvidia though, I think their driver is open source and supposedly better (updated more often, more compatible, faster?). Ati just don't invest enough time in their linux driver and they've kept its source closed because of 3rd party licenses or something.

[Áedán]

nVidia are fairly regular with their driver updates, but the driver is not open source. There's an open source 'wrapper' around a closed source binary. That way it can fit in with the existing system easily enough, but without giving away nVidia's trade secrets.

It supports OpenGL very well, I hear, but I've not tried using OpenGL with it yet!