AMD discontinues 32-bit support for their Radeon Software/Drivers

[WYP]

Do gamers still use 32-bit OS'? Answer - Nope



Read more about AMD/Radeon's decision to drop support for 32-bit OS'.

 

[Avet]

Does anyone still use 32-bit OS?

 

[Gambit2K]

Does anyone still use 32-bit OS?

Anyone that has just 4 Gigs of ram should use 32 bit OS (suprisingly many laptops sold in 2018 only have 4 GB RAM, and some are 700+ Euro ones). As the 64 bit versions actually uses more RAM.

 

[grec]

While 64-bit OS' are notably larger in install size and a tad heavier in startup RAM use, it's still generally recommended to use x64 on any modern system, particularly ones with 4GB of RAM, because the 32-bit limitation isn't a massive issue regarding the hardware's RAM size (Despite popular conception x86 extensions solved the problems of extending physical RAM beyond 4GB without the need for 64-bit addressing). The issue is that on a 32-bit system a program can't use more than 4GB of virtual or physical combined memory regardless of how much virtual memory could possibly be available, requiring processes generally stay within a strict 4GB limit. on a 64-bit system with 2-4GB physical memory it could still run a process that required 8GB of memory to run if it had enough virtual memory it could allocate to it, albeit with a performance hit.

So mostly 64-bit is used on low-RAM devices for compatibility reasons(Not just memory requirements but some software is x64 only and many drivers, I believe NVidia switched over a year ago), and to allow upgrades without having to reinstall the whole OS.

It's unlikely any system using the AMD GPUs targeted by this driver is going to be running with 2GB of RAM and 20GB of storage so it's probably not going to be much of an issue. I think Microsoft is targeting Windows-On-Arm for their cheaper ultramobile segment.