Welll, mx x1800xt isn't up to 1920x1080 for all games. But until early this year i played on 1280x1024, and the card easilly pulled that. That's why I haven't played crysis, gta4, far cry2 etc. It did run Mass Effect 2 though.
Thats a fairly random rant, but i pose some questions at you. 1. Why do you need a 64bit flash player (or indeed a 64bit web browser)? Many, many programs your 64bit OS has are still 32bit, they run just dandy on W7 x64. Yes it would be nice for all companies to update their programs to 64bit, but many programs really do not need to.
I kind of always assumed that there are downsides to having to shoehorn 32-bit compatibility into a 64-bit OS. I want to see things move forward for the sake of progress because I anticipate things being easier, and OS developers being able to direct more of their time to more fruitful ends, once it's all uniformly 64-bit. Hub gears worked fine, technically, but that didn't stop us moving to the other ones. I like progress. Every move forward is an evolutionary step, and 32-bit is now the vestigial organ that we will eventually eliminate completely. My issue is why Adobe show no intention of doing so. What the smeg else are they doing with their development time? Flash has 'worked' (a very relative term in this case) as well as it's going to for ages.
I'm running 7 64-bit on my soon-to-be-replaced gaming rig. I bumped the RAM from 4Gb to 8Gb and only really noticed the difference with PhotoShop and Lightroom. Does gaming really need much more than 4Gb (currently)?
I'm I missing someting here, July results Xp 32bit - 34.51% down 0.77% w7 64 bit - 29.77% up 1.26% since when was 29.77 more than 34.51 ?
The ATI users installing Steam could be to do with the Steam offer that was in the driver installer a while ago.
No, never. No game of mine has ever pushed me higher than about 3.4GB overall usage no matter how high I turn stuff (or, in the case of Oblivion, no matter how badly optimized the engine is). I imagine it's handy if you have a quad-core and like doing way too much at once, though - if you watch HD on one screen, play a game on another, fold in the background and keep a multi-tab browser open, for instance, I'm sure you could easily break the barrier. As with all things it depends how you use your computer.
I had to skip down from 4Gb to 2Gb a month or two ago thanks to a motherboard fault (haven't got round to RMAing it!), and I really haven't noticed a difference in game performance. Loading times may be slightly longer, but I haven't seen any noticeable performance drop. If I cared about benchmarks then I'm sure there would be a dramatic performance difference, but the point is that it's not noticeable to me. ME2 (about the most recent game I own) runs perfectly smoothly, even with some AA/AF switched on (@1680x1050, native panel res).