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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."
Whether or not the OS is truly 64bit is also of "little relevance", the 64bit-ness provides a speed boost to the 32bit apps and OS, and 64bit apps dont need the OS to be 64bit. Also, the computer is still 64bit, regardless of what OS happens to come installed on it.
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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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
Yes, with the same architecture, a 64 bit word size is slower than a 32 bit word size. Just think about it logicly- to add 2 bits in position n, you need to know the result of the last n-1 additions to know the carry (there's ways to partially mitigate this, but not totally do so).
Why don't we use 4 bit words? Because 4 bits would allow you to access 16 bytes of memory and hold the numbers 0-15. There's few apps that don't need better than that.
Now lets fast forward to the current world. Most computers use 32 bit words. That allows 4 GB of memory per process, and allowss numbers up to 4 billion. There are some aps which require more memory, mainly scientific and engineering apps. THere are almost no apps that require 64 bit math. And for those tiny few who do- a 64 bit math is easily emulated on 32 bit.
Really, the whole 64 bit thing is marketing buzz to get people to upgrade. There's some real need for it in servers and scientific workstations, but none in the business and home market. They're pumping it because people remember upgrading from 8 to 16 to 32 bit video consoles, where the upgrade replaced 10 years out of date hardware and lookeed like a huge advance.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
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