64 Bit Processor?

[PalmTree]

I will be getting a new computer once I finish my internship overseas, and I really want to get a 64 bit processor. I have narrowed my options down to a few Athlon 64's, and a few Athlon 64 X2's.

First of all, are there any problems installing either Project 64 or 1964 on Windows x64, or should I stick with regular 32 bit Windows?

Would there be any benefit to Nintendo 64 emulation if I got the dual core Athlon 64, or should I save my money and just get an athlon 64 3400+?

And finally, off the topic of 64 bit processing, What kind of video card should I get? I know this question has been asked many times, but different cards are usually better for different plugins depending on what the developer uses. I'm looking for a card that would be generally good with jabo's and rice's video plugins. I'm partial to ATI, but will switch to Nvidia if I must.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Palmtree

 

[Stezo2k]

First of all good choice for your cpu should be great in gaming and just as good in emulation

There shouldn't be any problem with these emus in x64, i've tried many apps and games in it and they all work flawlessly, i don't use it as a primary OS yet though as my DSL modem doesn't have drivers yet (they're still developing them). You can always use dual boot if you have any issues with win x64, probably the best way.

For emulation there is no benifit having a dual core CPU yet, in the future though emus probably will take advantage of this and possibly x64 cpus

ATI cards tend to perform better with those plugins, if you aint going to use many pc games i'd go for something like the Radeon 9600, if not maybe a 9800 or a x600 should do the job nicely.

 

[PalmTree]

Hey, thanks for the reply.

I think I will just stick to the Athlon 64 3400+ since there isn't support for dual cores yet. I can always upgrade in the future.

As for PC gaming, I would only play Knights of the old republic 1 & 2, and Halo, so I think any of those video cards would be good enough. I'll probably get the x600 just in case though... hopefully the price will drop enough in the next 5 months.

Thank you for your help

 

[Azimer]

With many processors being dual core, I am sure more authors will take advantage of this. Often times, an emulator will have a single thread for GUI and a thread for emulation. I am sure this will change soon so there is a thread for GUI, and multiple threads for emulation. This will make it so you can, for example, have a thread dedicated to CPU emulation while another thread is invoked when a new graphics frame needs to be rendered. As far as I know this shouldn't be too difficult to sync and will more or less make the emulation of the graphics "free". We aren't there yet, since this is relatively new. That is how I see things going though.

 

[Reznor007]

All MAME devs say dual core is worthless for emulation. Most of the slow games in MAME are due to a single strong processor (200MHz R5000 for San Fran. Rush), and there is no practical way to split emulation of a single processor over multiple parallel cores.