Released on April 30th, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition is an updated version of Microsoft's workstation operating system designed to support 64-bit processors and applications. This new edition of XP works with both AMD64 and Intel's EM64T, x64 processors that are compatible with standard, 32-bit x86 CPUs and binary compatible, as architectures, with each other, allowing Microsoft to release a single version of its x64 OS. In this article, SimHQ will compare the relative performance of the games in our benchmark suite on both versions of Windows XP. But first, let's take a quick look at the reasons why Microsoft suggests upgrading to the x64 edition.