News - 64-bit PC required for the next Battlefield?

[HEXUS]

DICE announces 64-bit required for some 2013 titles.

Read more.

[edvinasm]

Good. RIP 32bit says me and 16GB RAM

[alsenior]

About Bloody time. there is only one piece of hardware that i own that does not have 64bit drivers and that is a 15 year old 3com network card. now next up 32bit network addressing

[Lord Midas]

I've been using 64bit since the very first AMD-64 processors. I never saw the need to remain on 32bit. Its about time someone took the inititive and started making 64bit only software.

Kudos to Dice for taking the plunge. It can only be good for future gaming and software in general.

Plus, the best thing would be for Microsoft to release 64bit ONLY Windows 8 and forget about 32bit entirely.

[KeyboardDemon]

If this news had come around the time that 64bit CPUs were just starting to make their way in to the market then I would have thought it was a brave move, but now that 64bit CPUs have been around for nearly a decade I can't help but think this is way overdue.

I think people that want to play the next Battlefied will have no issues with upgrading or buying the hardware they need to make it work, I just did a google search on, "what do I need to upgrade if I want to run bf3?" and found it returned 29,100,000 hits, which suggest that a lot of people were asking this question of BF3 and I suspect many will ask about the next game too.

[crossy]

Plus, the best thing would be for Microsoft to release 64bit ONLY Windows 8 and forget about 32bit entirely.

IBM did exactly that a while ago with AIX (helps if you control hardware and software) and I thought Solaris was 64bit only these days.

All my desktop PC's are 64bit now, only held off while I was on XP mainly because XP's support for 64bit drivers I always found patchy, Windows 7 was an all round improvement. So these days the only 32bit gear I've got are smartphones and tablets.

Good on DICE for trying to force the issue, and if we end up with a better BF4 than would otherwise be the case then all the better. To me at least, it seems that there's a lot of folks out there claiming to be running 4/6/8GB RAM in their Windows7 boxes, so I'm guessing 64bit-ers are in the majority.

Problem - at least afaik - with not doing a 32bit Windows 8 is that this'd cut out the ARM devices since I was pretty sure that they were only 32bit. Unless someone's going to tell me different...

[Terbinator]

Makes sense for something CPU 'heavy' like Generals 2.

[Scribe]

IBM did exactly that a while ago with AIX (helps if you control hardware and software) and I thought Solaris was 64bit only these days.

All my desktop PC's are 64bit now, only held off while I was on XP mainly because XP's support for 64bit drivers I always found patchy, Windows 7 was an all round improvement. So these days the only 32bit gear I've got are smartphones and tablets.

Good on DICE for trying to force the issue, and if we end up with a better BF4 than would otherwise be the case then all the better. To me at least, it seems that there's a lot of folks out there claiming to be running 4/6/8GB RAM in their Windows7 boxes, so I'm guessing 64bit-ers are in the majority.

Problem - at least afaik - with not doing a 32bit Windows 8 is that this'd cut out the ARM devices since I was pretty sure that they were only 32bit. Unless someone's going to tell me different...

ARM devices are 32-bit (A15s likely to run windows do have 40-bit addressing), however 2014 onwards that may change as ARM's next architecture is indeed 64-bit.

[Spud1]

I dont think that this is really that "bold" a move, considering that there are minimal end-user advantages to the end user when it comes to 64bit vs 32bit.

It really just makes things easier for them in principle, as they only need to maintain a single version of code, they don't need to include as many tricks to get around the limiations of 32 bit mode etc etc.

The reality though is that whilst the above is a utopian truth, being an EA studio DICE will have to develop for consoles too, consoles which are not 64 bit. This means that the shared code (Which will likely be developed for the consoles first and ported to the PC, as with large swathes of the BF3 codebase) will still need all the tricks/alterations making..so it doesn't even save that much.

So basically I am saying I am not sure that there is much point for them, or that it's especially interesting apart from some people needing to upgrade to a 64bit OS/CPU.

[Terbinator]

I dont think that this is really that "bold" a move, considering that there are minimal end-user advantages to the end user when it comes to 64bit vs 32bit.

It really just makes things easier for them in principle, as they only need to maintain a single version of code, they don't need to include as many tricks to get around the limiations of 32 bit mode etc etc.

The reality though is that whilst the above is a utopian truth, being an EA studio DICE will have to develop for consoles too, consoles which are not 64 bit. This means that the shared code (Which will likely be developed for the consoles first and ported to the PC, as with large swathes of the BF3 codebase) will still need all the tricks/alterations making..so it doesn't even save that much.

So basically I am saying I am not sure that there is much point for them, or that it's especially interesting apart from some people needing to upgrade to a 64bit OS/CPU.

But they are.

[Spud1]

fair point I was wrong there.

So it may well have a slight advantage if they truely do abandon 32-bit code and design the engine to take full advantage of the additional registers

It's rare though for that to happen - most "64 bit" applications atm just compile in 64-bit mode, which makes next to no difference.

[watercooled]

Problem - at least afaik - with not doing a 32bit Windows 8 is that this'd cut out the ARM devices since I was pretty sure that they were only 32bit. Unless someone's going to tell me different...

It's an entirely different code base anyway, you can't just shove x86 code, 32-bit or otherwise, on another architecture CPU.

The reality though is that whilst the above is a utopian truth, being an EA studio DICE will have to develop for consoles too, consoles which are not 64 bit. This means that the shared code (Which will likely be developed for the consoles first and ported to the PC, as with large swathes of the BF3 codebase) will still need all the tricks/alterations making..so it doesn't even save that much.

Again, there's far more to CPUs than 32/64 bit (and it's far more complicated than that when you look at the console CPUs anyway), code for each of the consoles and PCs has to be compiled and tweaked separately, so switching to 64 on PC doesn't really make any difference.

As for the reasons for making the switch, it is, as others have said, way overdue. Come on, you're not going to be running any remotely recent games on a 32-bit CPU to start with so there's very little point in trying to retain legacy compatibility, and there are no real negatives to moving to 64-bit code, but plenty of positives.

[Scribe]

Again, there's far more to CPUs than 32/64 bit (and it's far more complicated than that when you look at the console CPUs anyway), code for each of the consoles and PCs has to be compiled and tweaked separately, so switching to 64 on PC doesn't really make any difference.

I would say this depends somewhat on how variables are managed/used at the higher levels, for example all ints/floats may become 64-bit, in the past if they didn't typedef longs/doubles as ints/floats for 32-bit to improve performance then parts of the engine at the higher levels will have varied and the move would take away this aspect of complexity/confusion.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

BF4:MAXIMUM ACHIEVEMENT TAGS(sponsored by the AMD and Nvidia friendship society)!


Yawn.

[1pnoe]

Good. RIP 32bit says me and 16GB RAM

I'm doing fine on my 11GB medley of 1333Mhz DIMMs

[=assassin=]

[QUOTE=crossy;3415]

Plus, the best thing would be for Microsoft to release 64bit ONLY Windows 8 and forget about 32bit entirely.

The way Microsoft is going with Win8, they'll probably drop 64-bit in favour of 32-bit