John Carmack Twitter speaking of ATI drivers.

ATI is running out of memory in the 32 bit drivers and failing ungracefully. Don't use "large texture cache" or multisample.

it is deeply frustrating that driver overhead can cause memory problems on a system with >5x the memory of a console.

Who even uses 32-bit these days?

The issue is also kind of weird. Does the driver not fully trash unused texture pages or what?

Next question: Why does Microsoft offer Windows 7 as a 32bit version?

The sooner 32-bit dies the better. We've had stable 64-bit hardware, OSs and drivers for aeons now; the only reason to still be on 32-bit is if you're trying to squeeze the last bit of life out of an old clunker.

I still use xp. It treats me fine.

Because people still have 32 compatible hardware.

Not for much longer. A few years more at best.

Correct. It looses support half way through 2014. Not bad for an OS I paid $99 bucks for. Sticking with xp allowed me to Skipp Vista and wait for 7 to come down in price and wait to see how 8 turns out.

Yeah, I know a guy still using windows 95. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Just don't pinch those pennies too hard or all you tend to get is sore thumbs.

95 is no longer supported. xp is.

Tell him that. It works well enough for him to use to run a business.

you all are forgetting, 32-bit is still a huge market in the buisness and government sector. Most top comapnies are handing out desktops and laptops that are 32 bit to employees.

I do work for a major electric/power/wind/oil and gas/aviation (take a wild guess who), and only a small fraction of workstations sent out are 64-bit (reserved for the highend portable and desktop workstations and servers).

its cheap, compatible, and works no differently for people in the office.

G.E.

Hey, 16 bit is even cheaper, but its outdated anyway. In the long run 64 bit is the way to go for just about everything if for no other reason then because of advancements in hardware. The next big evolution in computers is heterogeneous architecture where raw bandwidth (i.e. more RAM) becomes more important then having a faster processor or gpu. Cloud computing, molecular memory, and other advances will make those cheap 32 bit systems expensive dinosaurs.

But most of what is posted here is neither here nor there with the topic, plus most of those office rigs wouldn't run most of today's games since there video cards are not up to the task so it doesn't matter that there 32bit OS.
Has nothing to do with AMD/ATI drivers and the problem at hand. I do agree 64bit is the way to go for top end rigs.

Just a sidenote: I bought my Athlon 64 which i use to type this post in 2004 !
OS: Win XP pro 64 and 32.
XP 64 performs better than 32 on my machine in every aspect.

@beavermatic: Can't think of any reason to use a 32 bit OS except for reusing (very) dated hardware to spare money. How old is the hardware your company is using?

@zxTheWolfxz: Up to a certain point this has to do with this thread's topic.
With the amount of memory installed on todays machines, 32 bit systems (and their drivers) run out of memory due to their limited memory adress range.

The memory barrier is one reason to junk 32-bit. Another reason is availability - I too bought an Athlon 64 back in 2004, and since then - is it even possible to buy a mainstream business desktop with a 32-bit CPU these days? I've been out of that line of work for maybe 2 years now so I can't be entirely certain, but I would highly doubt it. Of course you can install a 32-bit OS on x64 and it will work just fine, but you can also run 32-bit apps on 64-bit Windows and they too work just fine. The hard reality is that XP or earlier is just not able to take full advantage of modern hardware, or even hardware released at any time in the past 3 or 4 years, so by sticking with 32-bit XP you're seriously compromising your ability to get the most out of your hardware (just today I watched a 32-bit XP installation being brought to it's knees by a workload that would be shrugged off easily by 64-bit Windows 7, even given the same hardware).

The memory barrier hits at about 3GB on XP 32. 4GB address range maximum at 32bits / 1gb reserved for the OS. So if you install more memory than 3GB, which almost all available PCs today will have, you'll run into problems. I'm sure it's the same with Windows7 32. Looks like most people are not aware of this.
As you said, i can't think of any available desktop cpu sold today that is not 64 bits so it's definitely time to get rid of this problem.
Microsoft should stop selling Windows7 32 as nobody with a sane mind would want to install this on older hardware. XP does that job fine. But than again, MS would earn less money without selling Windows 7 32.