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More on 64-bit Gaming

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the well-the-server-half-anyway dept.

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."

5 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. But it's NOT 64-bit code! by JKR · · Score: 5, Informative
    In a straight port of code highly optimized for x86-32, Counter-Strike dedicated server tests with both 32- and 64-bit versions revealed a 30% clock-for-clock gain, and is expected to show further performance gains in future upgrades.

    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.

  2. Re:Well by dreamchaser · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. x86-64 also supports by gearheadsmp · · Score: 5, Informative

    x86-64 also supports SSE2, fyi. That link's a giant x86-64 FAQ.

  4. Re:Well by prator · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  5. Re:advantage ? by ErikTheRed · · Score: 4, Informative

    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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