A Messy Transition (Part 3): Vista Buys Some Time
 

As we saw in part 1 of this series, large applications and games under Windows are getting incredibly close to hitting the 2GB barrier, the amount of virtual address space a traditional Win32(32bit) application can access. Once applications begin to hit these barriers, many of them will start acting up and/or crashing in unpredictable ways which makes resolving the problem even harder. Developers can work around these issues, but none of these except for building less resource intensive games or switching to 64bit will properly solve the problem without creating other serious issues.<br>
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Furthermore, as we saw in part 2, games are consuming greater amounts of address space under Windows Vista than Windows XP. This makes Vista less suitable for use with games when at the same time it will be the version of Windows that will see the computing industry through the transition to 64bit operating systems becoming the new standard. Microsoft knew about the problem, but up until now we were unable to get further details on what was going on and why. As of today that has changed.

http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=3060