Derek Paxton explains why 64-bit gaming is a big deal

Thanks for the link. I'm reading it now.

However, the link links to the second page of the article, not the first. I assume that was a mistake?

Derrrrrrrrrrrrrp, fixed. Thanks

Good to see the death of 32-Bit, and gamers with toasters.

Finally!

I love the dig on EA (Maxis) with SimCity, even though it wasn't intended it's nice to see how a larger company is out of tune with it's fan base.

I have to disagree about this being a case of EA being out of tune with it's fan base. The idea of games running in 64 bit addressing has been building, yes, but the size of the effort to change from one addressing scheme to another is daunting. I was a part of such effort in the early 1980s with the change of an operating system from 24 bit addressing to 32 bit. And, as I commented on 2K's Civ V forum, I don't think it is something that can be done in a DLC or patch. It requires a complete rewrite of the game from top to bottom.

So timing is the issue, and with GC3, I think StarDock is hitting the timing just about right, combining the move to 64 bit with a brand new version of Galciv. Others will follow. Some will try it without a complete new rewritten version, but I think the risk of failure to their products will be huge.

Death to the 32 bit PC. I had a 64 bit for over 7 years and they finally dumped that useless pile of garbage.

Great to hear.

The thing with Simcity is that they wanted to model too much information per sim. That type of low level detail works fine in Tropico, because the population is measured by hundreds. The game doesn't have a problem keeping track of 500 people and details about them, and the fact that each person walking around the map has a job, a house, and individual issues is neat. Plus you can arrest them and stuff.

Try to scale that up and you start running into problems. And that's where Simcity fell over. It doesn't track enough detail about each sim to be that interesting, AND it can't track all of them without running into major performance problems. They aimed at something and just couldn't get it done in the time available.

Had they been less ambitious and aimed to use Simcity 4's statistical model instead, they could have made much larger cities because it scales up more easily.

I notice Battlefield 4 has a 64-bit client, and it performs much better than the 32-bit one. I wish BF4 would have shed the 32-Bit limitations entirely, and simply had moved on - like Stardock is doing. I see no reason to ruin a game for folks with reasonable rigs just so a few guys with toasters can still play.

Folks need to upgrade, it's a fact of life. I want the edge pushed, and admire devs pushing limits. EA is a good company, I like their products, but they need to STOP supporting toaster gamers, and be done with it.

Post this in the Mass Effect forums.

lol

it'll actually create more work as everyone will expect worlds to be bigger and units to be more detailed...

developers will run out of budget for important things

but more memory is still a good thing

Applauds the choice to move away from 32 bit and the restrictions it brings!

Ironically the 64 bit requirement for COD:Ghosts is causing all the COD people's heads to explode... The Ghosts forum looks like a bunch of luddites arguing over which rock looks better.

I am pretty geeked about finally using the 64bit systems, they have been in the hands of consumers for years. I know that companies didn't want to leave anyone behind so they mostly stuck with 32bit efforts in the past. I am ready to move on. Lets move some more bits.

I don't know if this is the right place to ask this, or if the memory requirements of the game have even been decided, but what sort of requirements is galciv3 going to target. As saying your going to be able to use more than 2gbs (because your a 64bit process) is immaterial if your going to limit the game to 3 or 4?

E.g. Is the aspiration to make galciv3 scale to the amount of memory the computer it's running on. For example if I have 16gbs I'll be able to run a game "x" large but if I have 64gbs I'll be able to run a game four times larger than "X"?

Agreed, enough said.

I hope that they don't go too big as the most I will have is 32gb's as I'm not spending more than 2k on my new system but I'm sure looking forward to this game either way.

Iirc it was mentioned somewhere (but I can't find it at the moment) that the minimum RAM would be 4G, but I have no knowledge of what SD has, or will, run into in terms of how much RAM is going to be needed to run the game smoothly with which options. Perhaps they are still trying to figure that out as well.

Does that mean that the minimum RAM requirement will be 4G. Maybe, maybe not. SD may find that 4G isn't enough, or (although not likely) that the game will run well even on 2G if certain other restrictions are applied.

Does that mean that if you have only 4G on your system that SD3 will be restricted to 4G. No. Like any application program SD3 should be using "Virtual Memory". RAM is only part of what the operating system allocates to any application program as virtual memory (only specialized programs such as maintenance and test utilities need direct access to RAM). Several factors will dictate whether 4G is enough for the style of play you use. For instance, it may be enough to allow small maps to run with blinding speed, but immense maps may be subject to overwhelming amounts of page swapping (a condition that occurs when the app uses more virtual storage at a very high rate than the OS has RAM), which is one of many causes of poor performance. (Another cause is high generation of heat in the GPU and/or CPUs. Another: Running two or more "RAM hog" applications at once. There are others.) Does that mean you need 64G to play a game with a map size 4X the size of a game that was pushing 16G of RAM? No. It may take 18g, 24G, 32G, or, as you asked, maybe even 64G, but the scaling can not be expected to be linear.

How will you know? There are system monitors that can help "see" what resources are being used and how effectively the use is. I have a gadget called "All CPU Meter" from AddGadgets.com" that gives me how much of the CPUs are being used, how much of RAM is being used, and how hot the CPUs are. I have a gadget called "GPU Meter", also from AddGadgets.com that tells me how hot the GPU is. And I have an app called "HWMonitor" from CPUID (I am not sure what the web address is) that gives me the same information and much more. There also should be an application that shows things like page swap rate and swap file usage that can be important in evaluating performance problems. Otherwise, knowing if you need more RAM on your PC to support your game style, or whether there is some other resource needed, can be a great big guessing game.

It'll depend really. I mean with mods going crazy you could easily push the game pretty hard. If the Skyrim people had even 8GB of RAM they'd be throwing in everything but the kitchen sink into the game.

Just a bit of a random poll concerning RAM limits. Would you prefer

1) Soft limit. Game will run no matter how much memory you have. But will begin to beg for mercy on turn 100 of your immense map run

2) Hard limit. Game detects your RAM. Below a certain amount, it says BZZZZZT get more RAM! (note this is causing some pretty insane cognitive dissdance with the COD:Ghosts people, and I use 'people' rather loosely for some of them)

3) Soft serve ice cream limit. The game will run with any amount of RAM, but has some limits in the UI such that a 4GB system might only be able to load a large map, 6GB system larger, 8GB systems immense maps.

Option 1 is not possible. The StarDock people will probably (and I have great faith in their knowing the need) test to find the minimum limit it will work with well for the minimum settings that will be allowed, and that will be the bottom limit.

Option 2 sounds like what I expect to happen, with the added warning from the game that the game will perform poorly if you have selected options that their tests show will not perform well. A nicety would be suggesting how much RAM should be added if one really wants to use the selected settings, which makes this sound like options 2 and 3 combined. 

Option 3 is much like option 1 except for what I pointed out in option 2.

First, I don't believe these people will be much trouble, especially if they have been following this forum. If SD handles this issue as well as I believe they will then they should have very little to complain about.

I hear the toaster gamers are crying on the COD forums..

Well tough luck!  A stick of ram is $15 these days, my god - upgrade...

I am so glad Stardock is taking a stand, and not wasting time/resources catering to people on junk computers. I am also very happy they are pushing the limit and not holding everyone back because of a few toasters.

I'm sure people will whine about it.. Let their tears feed this game.

^^^ LoL Kobrano...

Personally I am very happy they are moving to 64 bit. Great job SD!

what do you have against toasters?  Toaster ovens are a vastly superior way to heat food..  (outside of taking a bit longer) faster does not always mean better  

I'm going simplify this by asking, why would a programmer want to know your memory amount? They got rid of the 2gb barrier, so they can make data available up to several terabytes now. With game like this, where you randomly generate the world every time you start a new game, it is up to you to choose the settings your hardware can handle. I don't think the ram memory is the real issue, because you can still even now days extend that with virtual memory. No, the problem you are going to encounter is the processing of that data.

You still have to be able to load the necessary stuff into RAM. If you try to make a game that actually needs 64GB in memory to run on a system with 8GB of RAM, you're going to have a bad day.

The address space is virtually unlimited, but the amount of stuff you can actually have in RAM at one time is not.