Evil Avatar contacted Epic's Tim Sweeney to ask him a few questions about the upcoming 64-bit update to Unreal Tournament 2003, nice info for those of you that have been hitting your heads against the wall ever since the Athlon 64 was announced :

Evil Avatar: Can you give me any idea what kind of a performance increase people might see running the 64-bit version?

Tim Sweeney: In pure CPU performance, Athlon64 is about 15% faster than previous Athlon's of identical clock rate for 32-bit apps, and 30% for 64-bit apps, because it exposes double the number of CPU registers, enabling the compiler to generate more efficient code. As for UT2003 performance, we haven't benchmarked yet but expect it to be faster though less than 30% because the GPU is as significant a factor as CPU.

Speaking of which, NVIDIA seems to be working very close to AMD as of late, talking already of Barton supporting chipsets (512k L2 cache & 400 FSBs), no doubt we will see more action from them once the nForce 2 starts rolling in masses and newer CPUs are released.