Sgolds, Tenchu, that's a fast backpeddle! Games will be optimized for 64-bit and released in 64-bit and 32-bit versions. This season you will see both supported, next year the 32-bit versions will become legacy games no longer updated.
As long as the vast majority of new computer sales remain 32-bit, we'll continue to see the 32-bit versions of games supported and released. I don't forsee a big jump in game performance from 32-bit to 64-bit; even a 20% improvement in frame rate amounts to an evolutionary step in graphics quality, not a revolutionary one. That's enough for the early adopters and the hot-rodders, but it's not going to drive any wave of new demand from the mainstream.
There isn't any need to require 4GB DRAM, that is a strawman. We are talking about the rendering advantages of using higher precision math functions, in addition to general speedup by taking advantage of register passing.
What "higher precision math functions" are we talking about? 3-D graphics is all about vector processing, not higher precision.
Too bad Itanium isn't a workstation chip, as once envisioned! It would make a great game chip (at the right price).
Intel had a pet project a long time ago where they wanted to adopt an Intel platform for arcade games. I thought at the time that if Intel could design a low-cost Itanium platform, it could have not only become a great arcade platform, but also a video game console similar to that of Playstation at the time.
Of course, that risked commoditizing the Itanium platform, which would have been a big business no-no.
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