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64-Bit Gaming Oversold to Consumers
Ryan Shrout writes "Recently AMD and Atari have both been promoting the game "Shadow Ops: Red Mercury" as the first 64-bit game to hit retail shelves. Even without an operating system ready for it, both companies want us to believe that the 64-bit version of the game adds a large amount of detail and visual quality that the 32-bit version just can't handle. PC Perspective decided to go buy the game and test those claims."
” gamers will notice larger and more detailed areas to explore, breakthrough artificial intelligence (AI), and never-before-seen textures that compel players to gawk in amazement."
Please folks, do not GAWK in amazement.
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
64bit game?
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Urm correct me if i am wrong - but N64 and howabout the Atari Jaguar? werent these 64bit consoles? and jees isnt the Emotion Engine (PS2) an 128bit processor? I think we have had 64bit (and higher) games for a while. This seems to be just as far fetched as Apples "Worlds first 64bit desktop computer"
Nick
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64 bit proccessors are still new, and aren't going to crush 32 bit anytime soon. As the article mentions, the only difference between the two versions they noticed was the 64bit had the extra things like rocks and stuff. Although things like that do take up substantial computing power, todays 64bit proccessors aren't going to have an easier time doing it then the 32bit counterparts. So we can conclude (as the article suggests) that they were added in there just for marketing purposes.
Once RAM gets cheaper, then 64bit gaming will start to seperate from 32bit. 64bit processors pass the 4GB RAM barrier that 32bit ones are stuck by. I think the maximum is around 16exabytes or soemthing (it goes GB, TB, PB, EB) Also, in a few years the fabrication proccess will have advanced, allowing them to stick more transistors on a chip (which isn't a benifit of 64bit or anything, but by that time theyre gonna at least be slowing production on 32bit proccessors if not completly stopped)
There's some new objects in the levels of the 64 bit game. Hardly anything to do with the amount of bits, but technically they are not lying for saying the content is exclusive for the 64 bit version. As long as they avoid saying those objects could not have been there with 32 bit hardware.
Okay, the screenshots published by Atari and AMD were deceptive, but they have now removed those too.
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Admittedly I haven't played it and game reviews are pretty subjective in my mind, but it seems Atari should have spent time makin' a more grounding breaking game gameplay wise than fiddling with making it 64-bit
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Last I checked AMD was shipping Opterons over a year ago.
And I know several people who have Athlon 64's at home.
How will console gamers handle this? Plenty of them think they're playing 128-bit games right now.
64 bit Windows games are hardly worth discussing until we get an OS. Latest release date is sometime in the 1st half of 2005.
4 _preview.asp
Recent article:
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_x6
Here is AMD's PR about this game. Here is Firing Squad's review with ATI cards and mentions Athlon 64 briefly.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
AMD is trying to tell consumers that a 64-bit architecture will make for a more enjoyable gaming experience. This reminds me of the marketing hype Intel was pushing about how MMX would make games that supported it oh so much better. As most PC gamers have learned by now, switching from last year's top-of-the-line processor to this year's top-of-the-line processor will gain you about 5%-10% frames per second. On the other hand, switching from last year's top-of-the-line graphics card to this year's top-of-the-line graphics card will gain you 50%-100% frames per second. The limiting factor in today's games isn't the CPU; it's the graphics card. The 64-bit transition will probably bring better performance gains than boosting the processor speed would, but still: all it gives you are higher framerates and faster loading times. Now this may allow for higher detail and visual quality for the 64-bit version at the same frame rate as a lower quality setting in the 32-bit version, but 64-bit gaming does not magically give you higher detail and visual quality on its own. Trying to get the point across with side-by-side screenshots is pointless. Real graphical processes like anti-aliasing, pixel shading, or ATI's Truform result in visible differences, but a performance increase is a performance increase. Konami didn't go from this to this by taking their Playstation code, sprinkling some 128-bit word size pixie dust and recompiling it for the Gamecube.
Wrong. Some code benifits for the increased register size that 64 bit processors bring. In some cases the speed increase can be several hundred percent due to drasticaly reduced memory access.
ok the idea of 64 bit is that floating point operations will have twice as many places past the decimal as 32 correct? Am I wrong or do processors not have the power to fill in the finer detail that 64 bit would provide in real-time which is necessary for games. Maybe if you ran a 64 bit cluster to play Pong it'd give better details, but otherwise I don't think 64 bit will offer much for a few more orders of magnitude.
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the only good reason to get a 64 bit amd, is not the extra 32 bits for memory addressing or register width. its the fact that its has more than just 4 basic registers for the cpu to base all of its work off.
I have extremely good hearing, and can for example tell when an external clock is out of sync, from the artifacts produced by the 'jitter'. Likewise, I expect there are some people who will be able to tell the difference between a 3d engine using 64-bit arithmetic vs 32-bit arithmetic. It may not be everyone, but there will be some people who will always be prepared to pay a premium for quality.
Does this mean that Duke Nukem forever will come out as 64-bits, that's probelby why there delaying it!
What about Unreal Tournament 2004? Not only did UT2k4 ship with Win32/64 binaries (and support), but it also shipped with linux32/64 and mac binaries (no support).
The game doesn't show up any power of the 64-bit at all. People keep talking about the detail but look: Doom 3 make it far better on the 32-bit. I thing what AMD and Atari did is that they identify whether the CPU is 32- or 64-bit and then display the details acordingly.
It also shipped with a whole lot of refried suck.
LOL yeah that game sure is taking a long time to finish rotflmao They should rename it to Duke Nukem TAKING Forever *SNORT* jk lol its kinda funny they're taking so long to do the game its sort of like a big joke lol k, its rediculous
There are several different meanings of "64-bit" and they all have differing impact on making videogames (and computing in general for that matter).
32bit vs 64bit address space: Currently most PCs and all game consoles can handle up to 4 gigabytes of memory. This is getting to be a problem on PC because games are using hundreds of megabytes of textures and because memory-mapped I/O for things like PCI cards eats into that total available memory. Going to 64bit addressing completely solves this problem. This is the "64bit" this article is about. The game in question doesn't really take advantage of this, however.
32bit vs 64bit precision for floating point math: Not really a big deal at all. You can do 64bit math already on all the systems, it's just not done in hardware so it's very, very slow by comparison. There's almost never a need for the extra precision anyway; things that lack precision at 32bit are usually flawed due to positive feedback or a lack of understanding of the math pipeline.
32bit vs 64bit data bus: We've already gone to 64bit data busses and beyond. PlayStation2 uses a 128bit wide data bus. Helps you feed data to the CPU (and other system devices) more quickly. Very useful but old technology these days.
32bit vs 64bit registers: Old news, we went to these with the original Pentium. Basically the same argument as for 64bit data bus.
32bit vs 64bit colour: Going from 8bit integer colour channels (ie. red, green and blue from 0-255 each) to 16bit floating point colour channels. This gives you a huge amount of dynamic range for colour and makes it easier to represent very subtle differences too. You need fairly complex pixel shaders for this to be worthwhile, but if you do have that capability it makes all the difference. The next generation of consoles will use this as will coming PC games - it will make their lighting feel much more realistic.
Graham
Read..
According to these benchmarks, a 64-bit Athlon actually runs games FASTER under the current 32-bit version of Windows XP than under Windows x64 with the latest beta drivers and such. Some games saw as much as a 35% decrease in framerate under the 64bit windows beta.
This just goes to show that we can't really evaluate 64-bit apps on 64-bit platforms (except linux) until we have both an OS and final release drivers.
Nobody upgrades their processor because it has twice as many bits. Everybody is just looking at the (unscientific, but far more reality-based for comparison) clockspeed rating.
Besides what does it mean that the processor has n bits? That's the word size! (or is it? It's such a bloody useless processor comparison metric that even I am confused.) We're not exactly in the stone age anymore. There's tons of more factors these days that make or break the thing.
This is just marketing rubbish. The "n bits" is so wrong as a marketing gimmick on multiple levels.
Remember when people moved away from 8 bits to 16 bits? Why did people move from C64 to Amiga, or from NES to SNES? Better graphics. Better sound. Faster load times, more storage (=less floppies to switch... well, theoretically). Nobody would admit that the only reason was because there was some magical performance boost due to switching to 16-bit architecture. (This, of course, from the consumer point of view. Coders might find it the only real reason.)
The point is, when the 16-bit systems were introduced, they weren't just introducing 16-bit processors. What was in Amiga that wasn't in Commodore 64? Cool graphics processors, a big honkin' sound unit, a 3.5" floppy drive (going from 332k to 880k without obscure floppy cutting rituals, whee!), more than apparently eight times as much memory... get the picture?
So if you double your bittitude, you have to also double everything else, or otherwise this is a pretty damn pointless thing.
Back when the PII was being launched with MMX, Intel gave the company I worked for then some money to help develop a game we were writing. A version would be bundled with new PII machines that would take advantage of MMX instructions and provide some extra features.
As it turned out, MMX wasn't all that well suited for gaming but we had some stuff in there that used MMX to generate some procedural textures on the fly, that kind of thing.
We shipped the code to Intel, and it went out with lots of Intel machines.
Later we shipped the retail version of the game - still 'enhanced for MMX'.
However, I was later working on a patch, or new networking code for the game or something (I don't remember exactly now), when I came across the source of the main bit that did the procedural textures. It had a check in to see if you had MMX and was meant to use it, falling back on a normal ASM bit if you didn't. There was also the reference C version still hanging around in the code that we had originally tested with.
When I looked at the code however, it turned out that some bright spark had obviously #ifdeffed out the ASM and MMX versions while tracking down a bug or something and had forgotten to put them back.
The version we originally shipped contained no MMX code.
Oooops.
I think some of the later builds we did (including I think the American version, as it came out some time later in the States than it did in Europe) actually had the MMX stuff all working, but it just goes to show that much of this stuff is marketing hype...
I think many people (even ones who are technically inclined) are easily mislead by the 64 bit advance in chips. If you think about it, normall processors are 32 bits, so 64 must be twice as fast right? It's not that 64 bit processors are twice as fast, just faster when dealing with data that needs the precision of 64 bits. Now, I'm not very sure how much 64 bit data modern games send through the processor, but I would imagine that in any decent game, the GPU matters much more. For comparison sake, I believe modern GPUs have 256 bit processors. I think that for some PC gamers, the whole stigma around bits might have carried over from console days, when progress was usually measured in bits (first 8, 16, 32, 64, and now most people don't care how many bits their xbox is -- which would be 32 for the CPU). I think most games and desktop users will not need 64 bits in the CPU for some time.
SIGFAULT
For the most part, I don't believe that gamers will be taking advantage of the 64-bit chips. I run a 2200+ Athlon, paired with a FX5200 card for the GPU, which is a 256-bit chip. (Correct me if I'm wrong). If I were to go with a 3000+ or 3200+ CPU and a 6800PRO GPU, then I would be able to run games at a comparable speed to those systems using a 64-bit CPU. It's really all about the GPU, and other tweaks that can be applied. That, and the fact that games and other programs have to be written specifically to take advantage of a 64-bit chip. Rumors that MS is going to release a 64-bit tailored version of XP are enough to make me want to stick with what I've got right now. Why pay for another chip, OS, and possibly a new version of the game I've already bought?
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Has Atari heard of Unreal Tournament 2004? Gosh, I hope they have! They published it! It's front-and-center on their site, and listed as the "Hottest Game"!
Or did you mean someone else?