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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."
I agree; for now. There are currently no games that *need* 64 bits for their next version, but why not plan ahead? In the next 10 years gaming will have taken a major jump into the realistic world. Doom 3 starts this jump, even at 32 bits. 4 GB will be required for this jump to continue forward. I want to look into my 3D monitor and see a monster; not a cartoon.
Why do i view Intel as Microsoft and AMD like Open Source?
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
Your right you'd think they would have time for it since all they have been doing for years is making Half-Life patches and expansions, oh yeah TF2(Where is it?) You would think they could afford a 3rd party to make port, wait hasn't the source been released?
This is a nice way to run a benchmark on a new chip. 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. Its also nice to see Valve putting in the effort to keep it customers happy and running at high speeds. www.valvesoftware.com Operon web page at AMD
hmmm...
THe reason why Intel is not interested in the 64-bit desktop is because there isn't really a market for it.
a market for it yet... I'm no business major, but do you think they're waiting for AMD to make a market for it? They'll be way behind on developement, but they don't have to spend any money on advertising the "NEW" 64 bit chips
I want to look into my 3D monitor and see a monster; not a cartoon.
Everybody who has preordered The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, where everything looks like a cartoon, disagrees with you.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Motherboard in my IBM NetVista computer (1.6GHz, 512MB) just died yesterday after playing new IL-2 Sturmovik FB for couple hours. I am sure, with currently fastest available 32-bit computers you will experience some kind of slowness if you, let say, increase resolution or fly aircraft over complex terrain or with many AI objects in the scene. Therefore, biggest limitation of 32-bit computing has come to desktop due to very sophisticated games and simulations. Intel is downplaying desktop 64-bit computing because the only solution they have requires complete rewrite of all applications, which very few can afford. AMD has great chance with Opteron to take the lead and shake Intel Empire.
Does anyone know what the story is with Valve? They worked for years and then came out with Half-Life, a huge monster hit. They re-wrote major portions of the Quake engine to do it! They had huge frickin levels! This wasn't two guys in a garage somewhere.
And then... lots of nothing. Half-Life: Opposing Force and Half-Life: Blue Shift were done by Gearbox. Counter-strike was mostly done by people outside Valve.
Did Valve lay off most of the people who worked on Half-Life? If not, how are they paying all those salaries? Does Valve have any actual projects in the pipeline (little pun there) or is Team Fortress 2 all they are working on? (And does anyone think TF2 will actually ever ship?)
For that matter, who the heck is Gearbox? Was it spun off in some way from Valve, or is it something else? How big is Gearbox?
I think that something really bad must have happened to Valve. But I don't have any idea what it was.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
How much of the 30% gain was due to the jump to 64 bits and how much was due to improved compilers, unrelated improvements to the CPU architecture, higher clock speed, etc?
For testing I play CS with 31 podbots with AI Enhancments on my workstation. I have CS Server running with admin mod/etc in the background, and another CS session for myself to play test.
CPU AMD XP1800, ATI9700/Audigy1, runs 100fps average on both server/client, but if I enable EAX it dips to 40's due to CPU load. Also AA turned on in the client doesnt seem to effect the server running in the background, so I run about 4x AA with 16x AF. (No trueform enabled)
But this is just for localized playing. Game hosting companies might use this 64bit machines. They need to run multiple copies on the same machine to turn a profit. We currently rent a CS server process at http://rentals.nuclearfallout.net/ for a 24 users. I know they run at least 4 cs processes per server. You can tell by the way which your CS server uses ports 27015-27018, unless they bind a CS server to an IP. (Hey can I patent that? j/k)
Is this a binary release for x86 servers only? How about a release for SPARC64?
Actually I always thought the most embarrasing thing was that there was no such frigging thing as a "3D0 Machine"... After years of PCs and their "standards" there was no way i would have spent that much cash on a machine based on some specifications :)
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
The idea is that the Athlon64 is supposed to be comparable in price to current rates on the Athlon XP. Or well, rates from a couple months ago, by this time. So if you can't afford that, you can't afford 32 bit gaming, either.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
you could use 64-bit integers to repleace floating point numbers
Sure, but why?
You wouldn't have the same accuracy that you would get from using floats
Correct...
it's a nice middle-ground between 32-bit ints, floats, and double-precision floats
Absolutely wrong. Anything that is going to be scaled or rotated (think matrix transformations, vector multiplication, and physics calculations) needs to have floating point representation, unless the processor architecture is incapable of it (the Gameboy Advance or other embedded platforms, say). You can have pseudo floating point with ints (last x bits are behind the decimal, say), but the software needs to do extra work: there's special cases for multiplication, etc. Most processors these days are designed to do floating point operations as fast as anything else, so adding unnecessary overhead that ignores basic funtionality would be stupid.
If you have a 64-bit cpu, use 64-bit floats instead of 32. 64-bit floats are superior for games because of increased dynamic range for lighting (less color banding with scaling) and other values, and of course less floating point round-off errors (less matrix drift).
Game servers do no graphical calculations, so there's no advantage there, but some of the physics could be done centrally to prevent the clients from making up their own and cheating.