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More on 64-bit Gaming
waytoomuchcoffee writes "Valve has announced "immediate availability" of a linux 64-bit dedicated Counterstrike server, designed to run on AMD's upcoming Opteron. This follows on the heels of Unreal Tournament 2003, previously reported on Slashdot. Gamespy has a related story up on a presentation of the future of 64-bit gaming (sponsored by AMD) at last week's Game Developers Conference. As Intel is in no hurry to make the jump to 64-bit desktops, this leaves AMD to court the gaming market."
Sounds like they are simply re-compiling with a new tool chain; nothing about actually changing the code base to take specific advantage of Opteron features. Still, kudos to their coders if their code base just works on 64 bit platforms; there'll be plenty out there that won't, despite availability of the SDKs and programming guides like this and this
Jon.
32 bit x86 code will run natively and just fine on x86-64 systems. You're getting confused by how IA-64 runs x86-32 software.
Since developers don't use assembly anymore, they don't write xbit code. Instead they use a high-level language like C/C++. When you compile C/C++ with a right compiler, you get a 64bit code.
Linux kernel works in similar way, if you compile some file on x86 you get a 32bit code, if you compile it on 64bit machine you get a 64bit code.
x86-64 also supports SSE2, fyi. That link's a giant x86-64 FAQ.
The Atari Jaguar was the first 64 bit game machine, predates the N64 by a few years..
If you dont believe me, look it up.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
x86-64 also gives you another chunk of architectural registers that the programmer/compiler can use. I'm sure this contributes to the jump in performance that is claimed along with the on-chip memory controller.
-prator
Immediately after Half Life came out, Valve were working on Team Fortress. After that was released, they continued releasing patches for the game. A bit later, they adopted CounterStrike and "helped" with some changes in the game, such as the new animations and netcode.
It's been leaked at some news sources such as www.ve3d.com that Valve are currently busy with Half-Life 2. One of the general theories out there is that this Half Life will have Team Fortress 2 included, or at least integrated with HL2. Most of us are also assuming that Valve has changed engines for the new games or are basically building their own.
At any rate, they're working on something, they're just taking their sweet time with it and not releasing any information about it. They've probably learned a thing or two from Duke Nukem Forever.
Yes, the memory is the number one factor requiring 64-bits support a.s.a.p. 32-bit Windows XP kernel has 2GB available for user processes where 64-bit Windows XP kernel ported to Itanium provides 7152GB for each user process (don't ask me why this number) from the over 17 billion GB of total available address space. This should be adequate for some tome in the future. :-)
strange, my P2-350 (yes 350 MHz) with 128 MB SD-RAM (100 MHz) did CS dedicated servers very well with 10-20 players, running linux. At the same time, it was router, DHCP, DNS etc.
30% clock for clock gain?
I believe AMD has quoted 15-20%, maximum.
Plus, your app will take just as many ops unless it's written to take advantage of 64-bit, not just recompiled, so I don't know where you're getting this 5/5 as opposed to 1/5 figure.
However, compilers and test machines for AMD64 have been around for a while now - I'm sure Valve has had the opportunity to do a lot of work on AMD64. I don't doubt it'll hit that 30% mark if they were smart about rewriting some of their slower code.
I run the servers for a washington D.C ~200+ player lanparty Capitol Punishment, and I know that we could use this kind of hardware. At the moment, we have to split our 10player counter-strike cs servers between at least 2 dual cpu boxes w/ scsi etc to excellent performance on lan. I know what I'm talking about, we are coming up on our 6th. Add to this various addons like adminmod, or in our events case, the wwcl plugin to make sure people arent abusing console variables, and you quickly need more horsepower to keep the pings low, and the choke low, so on and so forth.
To some it doesn't matter, but in a competitive environment, you want the fastest shit you can find. And spreading that across 2-4 boxes makes management a bitch. Not mentioning other servers for other games being run at the same time.
Now, the funny question, is what is the CPL going to do, since it's an Intel sponsored event. Although I won't disagree that some dual 3ghz+ xeon servers w/ scsi and dual channel ddr don't already make great game servers for my needs.
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms,
I suggest you buy ut2k3 from a Linux distributor and then e-mail mrein @ epic.com to tell him you did _because_ of the native Linux support :o)
It works great, and they are keeping the patches current with the Windows version. It has a 3Gb install though!
IME it is also faster, smooth as a rail @ 800x600 with all the options turned on, the same box running Windows needs all the options turned off, even when using DirectX not OpenGL.
Beep beep.
Hypothetically, you could use 64-bit integers to repleace floating point numbers in many places (think physics engines, graphics calculations, etc). You wouldn't have the same accuracy that you would get from using floats, but it's a nice middle-ground between 32-bit ints, floats, and double-precision floats. Generally speaking, dealing with integers is much faster than dealing with floats.
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Actually, AMD has reported upto 15% improvements from recompiling 32-bit code to take advantage of just those extra registers. Even with all those virtual registers, being able to remove all the instructions to spill-and-fill can be a great boost.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.