32- or 64-bit

[Emre Yigit]

Sorry if this has been posted before/asked elsewhere. (I've searched, and keep hitting Nikolai's sig.)

Will EU4 be 32 or 64-bit?

 

[Teurlinx]

32

 

[Cymsdale]

Gotta support those four or so guys who refuse to upgrade.

 

[Emre Yigit]

Thanks. So it could, theoretically, play on Win95?

Other than memory, I really don't know how EU4 would have benefited from 64-bit. Anyone care to enlighten me?

 

[justin6477]

The old thread. Looks like we'll get LAA flag, but not a full 64 bit program.

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?642216-native-64-bit-exe-or-at-least-LAA-flag

 

[Emre Yigit]

Thanks, justin6477. An interesting discussion.

All the more interesting since I apparently posted on it! Old age...

 

[Zanza]

Thanks. So it could, theoretically, play on Win95?

DirectX 9 doesn't run on Win95, so the Clausewitz engine won't either.

 

[jdrou]

Thanks. So it could, theoretically, play on Win95?

DirectX 9 doesn't run on Win95, so the Clausewitz engine won't either.

Also I believe everything since Divine Wind is built with Visual Studio 2010 which means it won't run on Windows 2000 or XP without SP2, let alone anything older.

 

[anubisfike]

Gotta support those four or so guys who refuse to upgrade.

Quote for truth.

 

[Teurlinx]

There's not many games with a 64-bit client even amongst AAA-titles. As long as 2 GiB of RAM is not a limitation then leaving out a - shrinking - portion of the user base tends not to be worth it. I don't blame game studios for this reasoning. They have to think about selling the game, not on having 64-bit on the label because it sounds so futuristic.

The LAA-flag was a nice enough concession

 

[jdrou]

Why upgrade if you don't need to? The only thing I would really want 64-bit for is to run multiple VMs (= need lots of memory).
I would certainly say that if you have a 64-bit CPU and Windows Vista/7 there's very little reason not to run the 64-bit versions (although there are some quirks that can confuse the less tech-savvy users).

 

[the.ront]

Does anyone know if it's 32-bit for OSX as well? I imagine so but I can hope.

 

[siis]

There's not many games with a 64-bit client even amongst AAA-titles.

Because so called AAA games are made for consoles and ported to PC.

 

[Culise]

Because so called AAA games are made for consoles and ported to PC.

Really? Oddly, the Xbox 360 uses a 64-bit architecture for the CPU (Xenon), as does the Playstation 3 (Cell). The Wii does not, but very few games are ported from the Wii to the PC. You can blame many things on shoddy ports (or at least, you can try to; it's not an argument for this thread), but I can say with reasonable confidence that this is not one of them.

EDIT: Hmmm, perhaps not. I knew there was something off about that assertion because I recall people talking about some dodgy tricks done in the specs to hide certain bottlenecks, so I did some more digging; the PS3, at least, is optimized for 32-bit rather than 64-bit. Still, it's not a very good argument, not the least of which because it neglects a large number of games that are not made for consoles in the first place.

 

[anubisfike]

Really? Oddly, the Xbox 360 uses a 64-bit architecture for the CPU (Xenon), as does the Playstation 3 (Cell). The Wii does not, but very few games are ported from the Wii to the PC. You can blame many things on shoddy ports (or at least, you can try to; it's not an argument for this thread), but I can say with reasonable confidence that this is not one of them.

The xbox 360 has 512 MB of ram thus you get games of very poor quality that are made to work on consoles with very little improvement in how the games work over the years because they are constrained by the console hardware. They don't need to enable them for x64 advantages unless they make major improvements for the PC version, which most companies don't.

 

[Fawr]

There's not many games with a 64-bit client even amongst AAA-titles. As long as 2 GiB of RAM is not a limitation then leaving out a - shrinking - portion of the user base tends not to be worth it. I don't blame game studios for this reasoning. They have to think about selling the game, not on having 64-bit on the label because it sounds so futuristic.

The LAA-flag was a nice enough concession

Paradox games tend to use a lot more memory than any of the other games I play. Which means I'd expect them to be one of the earliest adopters of a x64 client (since they have the most to gain).

 

[Teurlinx]

Paradox games tend to use a lot more memory than any of the other games I play. Which means I'd expect them to be one of the earliest adopters of a x64 client (since they have the most to gain).

I've never seen them go over 2GiB vanilla. And apparently so haven't the devs since they only included the LAA flag on request to support big mods.

Apparently it's also possible to use tricks to use more than 2 or even 4 GiB of RAM even when using 32-bit code if I understand Tegus right in this post:

It's not so much about recompilation as it is about different memory usages between the two. For example, pointers on 32bit systems are 4 bytes while on x64 they are 8 bytes long. The same argument can also be applied to some of the basic integer types. This can in turn lead to really obscure bugs, memory overflow etc.

As for tablets going up beyond 4GB of RAM, that doesn't really guarantee that the processor will become 64bits. Note that the limit of 4GB is per process, which in a multiprocess environment means that you can utilize much more RAM system-wide. Translation of the process virtual address to a physical one can be solved by using a TLB or similar approach.