Slashdot Mirror
Dreadnought Demos Released
John Callaham writes to tell us that Gamecloud is heralding the latest release from Torc Interactive and AMD. The latest demos for the upcoming FPS, Dreadnought, have been released. The first is strictly a gameplay movie while the other gives a comparison between the game running on a 64 bit processor (which it was ultimately designed for) and a 32 bit processor.
It's interesting that AMD is pushing their 64 bit technology with this game. If it weren't for video games then what other reason would we have to continue to build faster computers?
Bradley Holt
I'm a little curious to see what the inside of a Kirov class cruiser looks like. I doubt even the CIA or the navy knows exactly. Based on what I've been allowed to see of our own conventionally powered Aegis cruisers and destroyers in the tours I've been on, and the fact that the layout of nuclear-powered ships is even more protected in both the US navies, there has to be a huge amount of conjecture going on here.
Still, I've always been interested in playing a game that effectively encompasses all of a relatively small area, rather than meandering through small parts of a huge area. Quite a few pictures of the Kirovs are publicly available, and if they study other ships (retired destroyers, battleships, etc), they should be able to create a very believable environment, with all sorts of mundane curiousities to explore. If the entire game really takes place on this ship, notwithstanding the fact that it's dimensionally nearly as big as an Iowa class battleship, it should lend itself well to that sort of game design. Being on a ship also offers some fun. For example, they could change the weather and sea states throughout the game (how about throwing a grenade in a 40 knot wind?). I thought the varying weather was one of the nice subtleties of Enigma: Rising Tide (although that's not an FPS).
Of course, it could end up simply sucking like most other games out there.
... and wow, how very underwhelming. Firstly, it ran fine, such as it is, on my P4 3.2 Ghz w/GB RAM and Radeon x850 XT PE. The only problem is, the game sucks, even for a tech demo.
The environs are even more cramped than Doom 3. The sound is OK, but the graphics look about two generations old. Maybe that's the point? Are they saying that's as good as it gets on my Pentium proc? Well, hey, that's fine. If you'd rather not have me as a customer because I'm running a 32 bit Intel processor, there are lots of other games I can spend my money on.
F.E.A.R. is comming-out in a few weeks (which is what this game wishes it could live up to), or Quake 4. I can't wait.
Glows actually can be helped by 64+ bits, but not CPU bits. All of the latest generation of GPUs, and some previous (basically all DirectX 9 GPUs) support colour depths greater than 32-bit. A 32-bit colour depth is 8 bits per colour, and 8 bits for transparancy. Given that 8-bits per channel is the normal output, it was generally thought to be enough. However anyone who's worked with shaders will tell you that small errors start to add up, and you can get nasty results. So new GPUs support 64-bit and 128-bit floating point colour.
Now because of the extra bits, and because it's a FP representation, you get much better colour, highlights, and shadows. Though the output is ultimately the same resolution, you don't have the clipping problems you used to, and you don't have errors that add up to incorrect colours.
Both nVidia and ATi have a bunch of demos that'll show you this, if you like. Any Radeon 9 or X series or GeForce 6 or 7 series will handle it.
However none of this is relivant to a 64-bit CPU. This can, and does work great on a 32-bit CPU. It's all internal to the GPU. Even if the CPU needed to do some work as 64-bit CPU would be irrelivant as only the integer unit is increased in size. FP units have been larger than 32-bits for a long time, current CPUs generally can handle up to 128-bit FP numbers, depending on what you are doing.
So you are correct, all fluff as far as the CPU is concerned.