Please make HOI 4 a 64-bit game!

[grunt11]

Please, I beg you Paradox, don't hamstring yourselves by catering to everyone that still has old 32 bit operating systems and ignoring the power made available by moving to 64 bit platforms. I don't know if it's possible to make both a 32 bit and 64 bit exe (it seems unlikely due to the number of games I've seen that only do one or the other), but confining yourselves to a dead and aging system will only hurt the series in the long run. With the heavy processing power that HOI games require, it only makes sense to use a platform that will allow you to use the vastly increased power that is available in contemporary PCs. Even if you're only developing the game for a low-end or mid-line 64 bit PC, that's still going to give you more to work with than just about anything with Windows XP on it.

So please, look to the future instead of the past and make the jump to 64 bit platforms. I think the long-term gains of being more flexible with the always-increasing power available to PCs and the ability to include more in the game itself due to having more power at your disposal will beat the losses of people that don't currently have a 64 bit OS (but can always upgrade). Don't shut yourselves off to progress! I think the game and series will be better off for it.

 

[imre]

Just compiling for 64-bit will not make things faster. Probably a tiny bit slower.
It is only beneficial if you need to address more memory that can be addressed by 32 bits (4+GB). If you are not going to hit that limit then 64-bits will just mean all references in code take twice the storage, requiring more total memory and the performance is practically the same. So if it runs as good as it can with 4GB then there is no benefit in switching to 64bit.

 

[Mrop]

Yes, RAM size is the main factor, and EU4 uses about 1GB of RAM (of maybe 3GB available). Relative cache size does also mean that 64-bits is not necessarily faster.

Sadly, MOAR BITS -> MOAR PERFORMANCE was only true in the nineties:


[video=youtube;mlRWqqWay7c]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlRWqqWay7c[/video]


Also, people are still using Windows XP. Not too many, but still not a non-significant amount. But who knows what it looks like when HOI4 is released?

 

[yamato1977]

Just compiling for 64-bit will not make things faster. Probably a tiny bit slower.
It is only beneficial if you need to address more memory that can be addressed by 32 bits (4+GB). If you are not going to hit that limit then 64-bits will just mean all references in code take twice the storage, requiring more total memory and the performance is practically the same. So if it runs as good as it can with 4GB then there is no benefit in switching to 64bit.

Technically that isn't true. Yes 64 bits will allow you to address more memory space (the most important bit - PUN!) however it also increases cpu computation speed a little bit. The reason is that with 64bits you can fit more information into a single "register", double that of a when only 32 bit. As a result you can operate on more information in a single instruction. On top of that it allows the bandwidth associated with memory passing (from main to CPU) to be quicker. In general this will give you small increase in perf (up to about 10% depending on compilers and how the coder had written his code). To be honest on modern day PCs you probably wouldn't notice any observable increase in performance as there will probably be more significant limiting factors. But it will not slow anything down thats for sure.

Having said all that there are still significant numbers of 32 bit operating systems out there (XP and vista/win7 32) so there isnt much point doing a 64 bit version now. They could potentially compile for both but that would double QA time etc and is probably cost prohibitive.

 

[hhyy_best]

No! please do not do that! My Win 7 is 32 bit.....

 

[Yoshino]

^This with My 32-bit windows7.

 

[Had a dad]

No! please do not do that! My Win 7 is 32 bit.....

^This with My 32-bit windows7.

And yet you both probably have 64 bit processors

 

[Darknotez]

And yet you both probably have 64 bit processors

And 8 gigs of RAM

 

[Centurion1973]

No! please do not do that! My Win 7 is 32 bit.....

^This with My 32-bit windows7.

Why dont you reinstall with 64bit version? Same CD key should work for for both 32 and 64 bit versions (at least it did last time I did this).

 

[1alexey]

And yet you both probably have 64 bit processors

I don`t think there was a 32bit processor for PCs made after 2004 or something. But there are still plenty of computers(laptops) that come with 3-4 GB RAM and thus are better off with 32bit operation system.

Al leas I can run all the recent(ME3, TES5, WOT, CIV5, ex) games on my 5 years old laptop, that has ~2.4GG C2D cpu, 3GB RAM and 512 mb video memory.

 

[Pete0714]

Normally, I'd ride the "don't exclude" train, but in this case, I see that most machines that have the requirements for any new games probably have 64 bit capability as well, and it is being released next year, not this year. So I don't have an issue with that. I got a new computer, any one of the reasons was realizing that I needed to get more compatible with games from 2010 on. We'll all have to do this sometime. Just a reality.

 

[Raventhefuhrer]

In any case I think the mid to late game slowdowns are a significant problem in any Paradox game, but especially Hearts of Iron, and should be addressed as much as possible.

 

[Sakura_F]

In a computer sense -- It is a catastrophic mistake to cut out 32-bit support. To be honest, Paradox should just optimize their 32-bit platform, and see if 64-bit is necessary. It's really not since HOI is intensive, but not THAT intensive.

 

[hhyy_best]

In fact, paradox will not need 64 bit at all if the memory requirement is under control. Many people think that 64 bit is inheritantly faster, but it's not true. 64 bit machine is significantly faster only when you require operations with larger then 32 bit numbers. Which I don't think is the case in paradox games. 32 bit is significantly better than 16 bit machine is due to the memory limit and the truth that 65535 or 32767 is far less than enough. but 2^31 is quite enough for most applications. Of course if paradox heavily use SIMD then I think 64 bit may have more advantage, but I believe this is not the case...

 

[Opus]

Also, people are still using Windows XP. Not too many, but still not a non-significant amount. But who knows what it looks like when HOI4 is released?

What, there's people NOT using XP out there? Why?

Best thing that came out of microsoft since 3.11.

 

[chopak]

You do realize that in few months XP will no longer be supported by Microsoft?

 

[atmafox]

As a programmer and CPU designer (hobbyist, mind!), I can explain more in depth why there seems to be a performance improvement on IA32/AMD64 despite the fact that cache misses, memory bandwidth, and storage sizes are all made less efficient by using 64bit pointers:
* AMD64 has a much larger register file in 64bit mode than 32bit mode, allowing for more values in use at a time
* AMD64 has a flat register model as opposed to a stack model for its FPU, making floating point calculations easier for a compiler to work with
* IA32/AMD64 use highly irregular sized instructions, packing as much information into as few bits as possible and this holds true with AMD64

That said, the downsides (and, for example, going from PowerPC 32bit to 64bit didn't have the above improvements, resulting in net slower code -- though there are also reasons that are more complex):
* L1, L2, L3 cache holds fewer individual items, resulting in fewer cache hits meaning more trips across the memory bus. Note, memory now runs FAR, FAR slower relative to the CPU than it historically has
* Every pointer (or 64bit integer -- most compilers use 64bit pointers but leave the default integer size 32bit with another data type for 64bit integers in C for the above reason) is twice as big, meaning it eats up more memory bandwidth and memory storage

The net of the above are why many Linux distributions are experimenting with 32bit pointer/integer/etc models in AMD64 mode to see if they can wring more performance form memory and such.

TL;DR: 64bit is not necessarily faster by virtue of being 64bit. It's the other improvements that AMD brought along that make for the improvement if the compiler can take advantage of them, and compilers are very good at such now.

Thanks!
-Atma

 

[Centurion1973]

Yes, RAM size is the main factor, and EU4 uses about 1GB of RAM (of maybe 3GB available). Relative cache size does also mean that 64-bits is not necessarily faster.

Sadly, MOAR BITS -> MOAR PERFORMANCE was only true in the nineties:

Also, people are still using Windows XP. Not too many, but still not a non-significant amount. But who knows what it looks like when HOI4 is released?

Didnt we get similar arguments (its not needed) for lack of multicore support in HoI3 1.00?

 

[imre]

Multicore support is completely different world. It would have significantly more potential to improve performance. But to do it properly would probably require changing quite many working and tested components under the hood, which is probably too costly, timeconsuming and probably not necessarily the best use of resource.. Also it is so easy to mess up and introduce hard-to-reproduce bugs.. you know how annoying it is when the game crashes after 6 days of intensive micormanaged battles..

If the engine is mainly single-threaded right now and modern hardware can run it sufficiently fast then I personally would prefer the effort went to content first. But in long-term multi-core support probably is necessary for HoI to retain the title of the most sohisticated and detailed grand strategy game.

 

[Opus]

You do realize that in few months XP will no longer be supported by Microsoft?

Nope, didn't know that. I have a spare copy of Vista somewhere, so I'll be good though. But really, rather not use it. Really annoying system.