64 bit?

#1

Quote:
So I do not believe that they will be even making many 32bit procs after the new year.

Something along the lines of 90% of the installed PC base is currently 32 bit.

Average lifespan of a PC is about 2 years w/o upgrades and repairs

30% of people choose to repair rather than replace thier current computers. Thereby keeping them an average of 5 years before replacement.

Current worldwide installed base of 32bit PC's is estimated at around 350 million.

30% of 350 million is about 115 million

Ergo even if the push for 64bit were happening today, the need for 32 bit processors would be approx 115 million over the next 5 years. A cheap 32bit processor makes about $25 for the manufacturer a highend one around $75, so lets go with $50 as an average.

$50 * 115 million is about $5.75 billion

My guess would be they will still be making these things in 5 years.

#2 True though I disagree with his comment on not making 32 bit processors... planning ahead is a good thing, especially if you plan to work on a game that might take a couple years

#3 Thanks for the input, that is the type of information i was looking for.
Scott

#4 Don't get me wrong here, I was not implying that 64bit development is a bad thing, and IIRC there IS currently an effort underway to get TGE to compile cleanly on AMD 64.

I'm just disagreeing on the fact that in 2 years there will be very few 32 bit processors being manufactured.

64 Bit PC's ARE the future of that, I have no doubt, all I was saying is that if your game is 32 bit, don't despair because you still have a HUGE target market, and there is NO reason why you can't recompile for 64 bit if you so choose.

#5 Not a problem i did understand where you were going.
thanks
Scott

#6 64 Bit PC's don't mean a thing without 64 Bit OS's/Apps. I'm not too sure if you can run a 64 bit app without having the underlying OS 64 bit as well, and I'm sure even if you could, you'd not get any of the benefit that 64 bit will offer.

OS' will probably be mainstream 64 bit within 1-2 years, apps on the other hand may take a while to catch up.

#7 There are two parts to this: Getting the existing code to compile and work at all, and then exploiting the wider machine word. The first part should be straightforward to someone sufficiently familiar with the code. It's the second part where things get interesting. What parts of the engine can benefit from wide words and new instructions?

#8 Myself and 5 friends have upgraded to 64 bit and am running linux in 64, but not windows as I can't get any drivers. Its pretty much a no plus upgrade until software becomes 64 bit. You can get a new board and chip for about $200

#9 64 bit on servers is likely much more significant than 64 bit on desktop (due both to upgrade habits and 64 bit Linux), so getting dedicated server code updated would be much more of a priority than the clients.

#10 I just bought a new PC for under $2K

AMD Athlon64 Dualcore 4200+ 2.2GHz
Windows XP Professional x64

TGE runs at double speed and makes design/development & gameplay impossible. I had the same problem with other games until disabling "write combining" under display settings, but the problem still persists in Torque. Anyone have any ideas?

#11 Does this mean TGE/TSE/T2D won't run on 64 bit PCs, or they won't run correctly? I'm planning on building on int the near future, so this thread concerns me.

#12 If you have a 64 bit processer and x64, you're screwed. Windwos x64 has no drivers, which is.... dumb. I have an Athlon 64 3200 and WinXP (non 64) and everything runs like a 2.2 AMD processer. It seems to work faster than my Intel 2.6 but it might just be me wanting it to be faster :)

If you're running windows XP it should run just like normal TGE/TSE (I don't own T2D yet, so I can't say) and I can verify that :)

I want a better windows x64 thats backwards driver compatible :)

#13 I use torque on 32-bit OS but a 64-bit CPU, and it runs perfectly fine :)

#14 I am writing this on an opteron workstation running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64. It took some fiddling but I got DirectX drivers installed for my video card (Ati X800XL). Only issue now is my sound drivers, I still run an "antique" sound card (SB Live) and have not found working drivers for it. But given the fact that my main focus right now in my development is game play I have not really tried to get my SB working.

Other than that my x64 system plays TGE just fine. I know there is no boost to TGE because of the x64, but the overall boost to the system was incredible when I moved from my P4 3GHT.

64 bit cpu's will flood the market - in fact both AMD and Intel are selling "low-end" 64-bit cpu's for well under $100
(DigiTimes article on pricing), but this will take years to adopt mainstream (outside the server market - we currently evaluating opteron clusters at work).

Even given the cheap pricing of low end 64-bit cpus, unless you are planning to target the bleeding edge gamers the majority market will continue to be 32-bit for several years to come. I would wager (with no facts to back it up) that the XP2600+ is very close to the "average" cpu in the market. Consider the fact that the AMD XP2600+ was released just under 3 years ago.

I believe that the 64bit cpu's are a great step over the 32bit architectures (although the most dramatic boosts come from the new memory addressing scheme which allows more than 4GB of clean addressible memory - not something I think most of our games here need :) but there is no great driving force moving the average populace to the 64bit cpu's.

And there are some programs currently on the market written to take advantage of x64... My Lightwave runs MUCH faster on my dual opti's... it is incredible :)

#15 All this talk about 64bit computing, and i think everyone is missing the real paradigm change that needs to be addressed (and probably not by us unfortunatly)

that being multi-proc.

assuming "the future" is 5 years away,

The future isnt a 10ghz 64bit cpu...

the future is 100 1ghz cpus per computer.

32bit emulation is supported well enough on 64bit cpu's these days, so while making torque 64bit would be great, the true question/problem that will make the solver very very rich is how to make a game scaleable over X number of proccessors, X being == 2^ ((currentYear - 2002) /3) or something like that. (I have a whitepaper somewhere outlining this if someone wants me to dig it up)

#16 Jason,
Multi-threading will make multiple processors transparent to the programmer.