DICE: Some Frostbite Games Will Require a 64-bit OS

[phate]

YAY the transition - that should of happened 5 years ago - is finally getting some momentum! Yay!

 

[mamailo]

About time, none of my games are x64;maybe 2 are Large address aware leaving most of my ram unused.
In my daydreams the games will start using the extra space to cache itself into ram; saving me the cost of a ssd.
Yes x64 computing has been available but XP 64 is the worst OS for drivers availability;overall software support and vista was ... well you know the history.Win7 finally iron the wrinkles.

Besides hardware platform is cheap enough now (4gigs in a 32bit processor use to need a server class MoBo and cost a fortune)

So hardware are ready;OS are ready;Consumers are ready; all it rest is just the developers to follow.

 

[zaznet]

[citation][nom]whimseh[/nom]It's not a desktop-class OS.[/citation]

Where would you get that idea? Without anything backing it up; this just sounds like Windows 8 FUD to me.

 

[captaincharisma]

For those who are wondering why some people are still using 32-bit OSes, is because 64-bit OSes don't support 16-bit software.

Proprietary software are a pain to develop. Tons of red tape, funding issues and that's not including an ignorant management that doesn't understand why a still-functional 1990's software needs to be replaced.

first, we are talking about gamers and the mainstream computer users not businesses. unless there are still a few gamers out there still wanting to go back and play the original version of wolfenstein 3D there is no reason for the mainstream to stick with 32-bit

and besides business rarely upgrade so MS wouldn't take much of a hit by making windows 8 64- bit only. and if they find they do just make a 32-bit copy of there corp version

 

[K2N hater]

[citation][nom]A Bad Day[/nom]For those who are wondering why some people are still using 32-bit OSes, is because 64-bit OSes don't support 16-bit software.Proprietary software are a pain to develop. Tons of red tape, funding issues and that's not including an ignorant management that doesn't understand why a still-functional 1990's software needs to be replaced.[/citation]
Businessman won't have to change their software as nowadays computers' run virtual machines rather well. Concerning the costs with upgrading PCs they can delay it for years but not forever.

 

[alextheblue]

[citation][nom]zaznet[/nom]I've seen too few titles release with any 64 bit option. I'm looking forward to having actual 64 bit games available for the PC. It's about time the developers started taking advantage of the huge install base to gain some significant performance increases.[/citation]What significant performance increases? From moving to a 64-bit executable? That isn't going to significantly boost performance in games. In other software maybe. It will allow the game to access gobs and gobs of memory, of course. Memory limitations aside, I could have you run two versions of a game back to back, one running a 32-bit executable, and one running a 64-bit version. I'd have to tell you which was which, otherwise you'd never know the difference.[citation][nom]captaincharisma[/nom]unless there are still a few gamers out there still wanting to go back and play the original version of wolfenstein 3D there is no reason for the mainstream to stick with 32-bit[/citation]Minor point, but that was a DOS game. So actually you could run it on anything that has DOSBox, including 64-bit Windows.

 

[demonhorde665]

"Johan Andersson suggests that if you do not currently own a 64-bit OS, the release of Windows 8 is a good opportunity to upgrade."


i wonder how big of a check MS gives him every time his statment is reposted somewhere ?

seriously dude... why are you smoking the window's 8 pipe are you trying to get PC gamer's to hate you. atleast say , upgrade to win7 or win8 that way you don't have a million gamer's ready to draw blood from you LOL !


PS> win8 blows win7 wil be the better choice and when win 8 hits stores copies of win 7 will go down in price to boot. !

 

[mamailo]

[citation][nom]alextheblue[/nom]What significant performance increases? From moving to a 64-bit executable? That isn't going to significantly boost performance in games. In other software maybe. It will allow the game to access gobs and gobs of memory, of course. Memory limitations aside, I could have you run two versions of a game back to back, one running a 32-bit executable, and one running a 64-bit version. I'd have to tell you which was which, otherwise you'd never know the difference.[/citation]

Since you have not seen it; you can not affirm that.

With my own experience Skyrim and Fable 3 INCREASE their playability in Win7 x64. Same system just XPx32/win7x64 dualboot setup.I know is inconclusive but still a indication of the things to come.

At the low end; a game is about to move;processing;shift, etc large amount of datasets and x64 is faster and more precise for that; for the following reasons :

a) Microprocessors executing x86 instruction working on 64 bit dataset is slower than a native instruction from 15% to 1000% and even more (compare signed FP multiplications)

b) Any 32 bit executable need a 10% overhead in average due emulation (Google WoW64).That alone would put many games from "unplayable" to "Ok" in the same hardware

c) 32bit kernel handles and window handles get the x86 path.Microsoft is also tired of BSODs; you know .Bloated coded is always slower.

d)32bit executables leave most x64 optimizations out because the lowest common denominator.x64 will raise the bar.In example duplicating a single instruction FMA4; AVX or XOP at 32bit takes hundreds even thousands of clock cycles .And those operations are needed every time a pixel changes a camera shift;etc.

e)Overall playability will be better. In gobs of mem the loading of textures;models;etc are reduced greatly.64 bit get bigger stacks too therefore better AI and larger numbers of enemies are feasible.x64 is much more precise so physics will be better and believable;less glitchy.Same for visuals.

x64 executables will be aviable. Then: You,Me and everybody else will notice the difference towards x86.

 

[jasonkaler]

Why is 64bit only ever said to address more memory and never any mention that programs that utilize the 64bit instruction set will be faster than the 32bit equivalent?

More internal registers = less memory bandwidth dependency = more speed.

 

[freggo]

While I don't care -much- about gaming, I think it is a good move to have 64-bit only games.
Let's face it, Excel spreadsheets did not put GPU hardware to todays levels and if Games can push us into 64-bit territory (and soon 128 bit?)... I am all for it.

 

[jasonkaler]

Why is everyone only pushing " The real benefit gained from a 64-bit operating systems is that it can address 4 GB's or more of RAM"
and no one mentioning that 64 bit code has been benchmarked to run up to 50% faster than the same 32 bit code.

 

[twelch82]

This will be common, so gamers should expect to upgrade. Now that both consoles are coming in with more than 4GB of RAM, the developers will want to make use of all that available memory.
To get the game to fit into 4GB on PC, that would force them to downgrade textures, etc. I think most gamers would rather just get a 64-bit OS and add some RAM than be left playing with downgraded textures.

 

[smeezekitty]

Quite absurd considering some people are still running 32 bit.

 

[twelch82]

I'm thinking that some of the newer games will start using 64bit instructions in their code as well, because despite what M$ Windows would have you think, a 32bit CPU is not inherently 4 GB of address space. I know this because I dual boot Win 7-64bit along with Ubuntu 12.04LTS-32bit (Which I found to be more stable than Ubuntu's 64 bit flavor) and guess what! Ubuntu 32 bit sees and uses all of my memory (6GB) minus what the hd2000 is using (which is usually between 128MB and 512MB but can go up to 1.7GB on massive video rendering). The point is the resources limit is artificially set by M$ for it's windows products. I remember all the crap we had to do to get around DOS's 640k limit which was again a limit of the OS not the hardware. In fact, I once owned a TRS80 Color Computer 3 that had an 8 bit processor, but was upgradable to 512K (supported by Tandy) or up to 8 MB by reprogramming the memory manager in the coco's GIME chip.

Sure CPU are limited by how many address lines it has (64k for the 6809E in the coco3) but a decent memory manager can use much more memory than this via page swaping. That is what the coco did and I suspect the same type of thing is happening in Ubuntu 32bit.

So if the new games just need more memory resources, then getting M$ off their butts and change their memory management software would be all that is needed (32bit Windows 'seeing' 128GB of memory isn't impossible and is pretty strait forward). Microsoft doesn't want to do that for whatever reason.

But I suspect many game and most other genres of development will (or are?) also using the new 64bit machine code instructions in development work. There are plenty relatively new compilers out there for various languages that compile 64bit instructions into it's executables. THIS kind of software wouldn't work on a CPU with a 32bit instruction set.

So you seem to want to know, what's this thing you're hearing about a 4GB memory usage limit with 32-bit OSes, and where does it come from?

You can kind of think of computer memory as a really long city block. Along this city block, instead of houses you have bytes. Each one of these byte-houses contains 8 rooms, and in each room a bit can be present or absent. Every byte needs to have its own unique address along the street, so that a program can use the address as a means of referencing where data should be stored/retrieved from without any confusion. A piece of stored data may use up one or more consecutive bytes; the data will be referenced in the program using the address of the first byte.

In computer land, those addresses are just a single number. On a 32-bit operating system, those address-numbers are stored in 32-bits. Well it so happens that the maximum number of unique values you can store in 32 bits is 2^32 = 4,294,967,296 = 4GB. That's why 32-bit applications can't use more than 4GB of RAM. They wouldn't know how to refer to memory locations beyond 4GB.

On a 64-bit OS, it uses 64 bits to store those address numbers instead of 32. A 64-bit OS could theoretically run out of memory support as well, but it wouldn't happen until you reached 4,294,967,296 x 4,294,967,296 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes of memory. That's a lot of bytes. Never say never, but who knows if we will ever reach that limit. But if we ever do, we can always move to a 128 bit OS.

 

[chewy1963]

I'm thinking that some of the newer games will start using 64bit instructions in their code as well, because despite what M$ Windows would have you think, a 32bit CPU is not inherently 4 GB of address space. I know this because I dual boot Win 7-64bit along with Ubuntu 12.04LTS-32bit (Which I found to be more stable than Ubuntu's 64 bit flavor) and guess what! Ubuntu 32 bit sees and uses all of my memory (6GB) minus what the hd2000 is using (which is usually between 128MB and 512MB but can go up to 1.7GB on massive video rendering). The point is the resources limit is artificially set by M$ for it's windows products. I remember all the crap we had to do to get around DOS's 640k limit which was again a limit of the OS not the hardware. In fact, I once owned a TRS80 Color Computer 3 that had an 8 bit processor, but was upgradable to 512K (supported by Tandy) or up to 8 MB by reprogramming the memory manager in the coco's GIME chip.

Sure CPU are limited by how many address lines it has (64k for the 6809E in the coco3) but a decent memory manager can use much more memory than this via page swaping. That is what the coco did and I suspect the same type of thing is happening in Ubuntu 32bit.

So if the new games just need more memory resources, then getting M$ off their butts and change their memory management software would be all that is needed (32bit Windows 'seeing' 128GB of memory isn't impossible and is pretty strait forward). Microsoft doesn't want to do that for whatever reason.

But I suspect many game and most other genres of development will (or are?) also using the new 64bit machine code instructions in development work. There are plenty relatively new compilers out there for various languages that compile 64bit instructions into it's executables. THIS kind of software wouldn't work on a CPU with a 32bit instruction set.

So you seem to want to know, what's this thing you're hearing about a 4GB memory usage limit with 32-bit OSes, and where does it come from?

You can kind of think of computer memory as a really long city block. Along this city block, instead of houses you have bytes. Each one of these byte-houses contains 8 rooms, and in each room a bit can be present or absent. Every byte needs to have its own unique address along the street, so that a program can use the address as a means of referencing where data should be stored/retrieved from without any confusion. A piece of stored data may use up one or more consecutive bytes; the data will be referenced in the program using the address of the first byte.

In computer land, those addresses are just a single number. On a 32-bit operating system, those address-numbers are stored in 32-bits. Well it so happens that the maximum number of unique values you can store in 32 bits is 2^32 = 4,294,967,296 = 4GB. That's why 32-bit applications can't use more than 4GB of RAM. They wouldn't know how to refer to memory locations beyond 4GB.

On a 64-bit OS, it uses 64 bits to store those address numbers instead of 32. A 64-bit OS could theoretically run out of memory support as well, but it wouldn't happen until you reached 4,294,967,296 x 4,294,967,296 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes of memory. That's a lot of bytes. Never say never, but who knows if we will ever reach that limit. But if we ever do, we can always move to a 128 bit OS.

You really need to read what I wrote dude, I know how memory works. There is also a technique called bankswitching that could in theory allow a 32 bit OS to access an unlimited amount of memory (although the overhead would get progressively more as you add memory). As I said I run Ubuntu 32 bit which has no problem seeing and using my entire 6GB of memory if needed.

 

[smeezekitty]

Linux has solid support for PAE which adds an extra 4 bits of addressing.
Windows is too stupid to support it.