32 bit version has far better performance than 64 bit on Win 7 64 bit (Thoroughly tested)
Hi. I have spent the better part of last three hours trying to figure out what on earth caused all these stutters I were experiencing. I eventually used the console command "perfoverlay.drawgraph 1" and saw that there was a huge amount of spikes from both the cpu and gpu. The fps itself was good, but there was a pronounced amount of stuttering both in my and other characters movements, something I could observe even when standing still. I also were puzzled as to if the stutters, while being even more noticable during high gpu load, were caused by in-game setting or the fact that I am running sli. I tried disabling sli, and while it initally seemed better, I realized that the stutters appeared as soon as the game became more intensive. Finally discarding the idea of disabling sli, I started looking elsewhere.
And alas. I discovered that if I go into my games section of Origin, right click on the bf4 icon and then select game properties, I could finally select 32 bit (x86), something that confused me due to the two 32 and 64 bit icons on my desktop. Turns out you have to manually choose 32 bit if running in a 64 bit environment, as its on auto as default.
Anyhow, the moment I entered the game I was blown away. Running a single card first I immediately saw that the stutters were all but gone, and when I added my second GTX 770 that also worked perfectly. Now I can run anything but post processing and effects on ultra, and still keep 4xmsaa (turned off post aa as it blurs the textures too much). And to underline this, there is NOTHING wrong with my pc. Latest drivers and updates, and I've been using pc's since back in the early ninenties. Also have no problems with running any other games on my pc, so the culprit seems to solely be the 64 bit mode of bf4. The "perfoverlay.drawgraph 1" command also proves this, as there basically are no spikes remaning now. The only downside is that the Origin overlay seems to disappear in 32 bit mode, of some strange reason (cant hit shift+f1).
This leads me to think that win8 somehow handles 64 bit differently, or maybe defaults to 32 bit, as many users report getting much better performance with win8. This seems like the exact realization I made after trying out the 32 bit mode.
It would be interesting to hear if any of you other users experience the same thing when trying to manually set the mode to 32 bits, in particular when running win7. I also think this would be an interesting point to research EA, as frankly most of us would like to run 64 bit by now.
