Its 2011, who still has a 32-bit CPU and is able to even run new games at acceptable framerates? Those chips haven't been manufactured at all for years now, the only reason 32-bit even has market penetration is due to stupid OEMs shipping 64-bit capable machines with 32-bit Windows, and even sillier system builders buying 32-bit Windows and 4GB+ of RAM, then complaining Windows doesn't recognize all their RAM. Regardless, a 64-bit aware executable is not too much to ask for. The original Far Cry had a patch that added 64-bit support, and that was when 64-bit was available on one AMD processor. For Skyrim not to have this would be an incredible insult. I will be seriously put off if this game still has Oblivion's 2GB limit. I've seen Firefox using more RAM than that.

I would love to see an optional question at the start of installation for a 64 bit or 32 bit mode. Keep it optional so you don't alienate the people with older hardware/OS, but keep it around for the enthusiasts.

What game/software these days aren't made to support 64 bit? 64 bit was the wave of the future 6 years ago. I've not seen anything made in the last 4 years that wasn't 64 bit capable.

Eh, doesn't need to be optional. It is trivial to automatically sense whether the environment is 32-bit or 64-bit and launch the correct executable.


Exactly. It's actually been longer than that. The first Pentium Duos and AMD Athlon 64 processors were the first wave, both severely antiquated now.

I'm not implying it should allow you to install 64 bit onto 32 bit architecture, but I am saying 32 and 64 bit versions should exist.

Use an LAA patcher. Problem solved. Also not illegal.

As for the ridiculous comment about Firefox using >2GB, whatever you're doing to make that happen, you're doing it wrong.

I think the OP is referring to a 64-bit version of the game, optimized for multi-threading and able to benefit from systems with large amounts of RAM, rather than an x86 version that is compatible with 64-bit Windows but not optimized for multi-core systems and rather limited in how much RAM the game can benefit from (even with a patched executable like this http://www.ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php).

There are relatively few games that have been released with x64 versions, but I imagine all recent games are compatible with 64-bit windows.

http://www.start64.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=190&Itemid=60

Hopefully.

Well my answer will remain the same if that's what he was asking. Many of the top games nowadays can multithread. (thank god) It does get annoying playing some games that don't allow for multithreading and so my quadcore runs slower than a dualcore would.



I realized that it wouldn't fit under the forum rules after I had typed it and I edited it before you quoted me. I would appreciate it if you could edit your post to delete the quote. Thanks in advance.

They make most of their games fairly future-proof. When their games come out they almost always allow for top of the line features. 64-bit has been around for quite a while, at least long enough that most people use it. However, not everyone uses it, and Bethesda usually makes their games with everyone in mind: low-end PC gamers, and hardcoe graphics-intense users. With all of this in mind I have no doubt whatsoever that there will DEFINITELY be support for more than 2 Gb of RAM, there will be compatibility for 64-bit, but I doubt the game will have a 32-bit and 64-bit version, at least not on the disk. They may decide to have a 64-bit version online that you could download though. They did something similar to that with HD textures for oblivion.

If it is on Steam, which seams likely, there will be no 64bit mode. Therefore there will be a 2GB limit. Not supporting 64bit mode does not prevent a game from fully using a Quad Core CPUs.

Steam detects your OS and installs 64-bit version if your game has one. At this point there are still only a handful of games with 64-bit versions.

My mistake, I thought their treatment of Crysis was the norm. Steam could support 64bit operation.

not sure why, but yes it seems you have an additional step to transition to the 64-bit version of Crysis
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1221787

For other games such as HL2, my understanding is that steam updates to the 64-bit executable automatically.

From the podcast:

Half-Life 2 no longer supports x64. They removed it because it was unstable. Steam will have no impact on the x64 of this game however.

This doesn't make the game 64-bit though. The EXE is still 32-bit, and with LAA it only increases the address space to 4GB max, and you still need a 64-bit OS for this to do anything which you know of course. The limit for address space on a true 64-bit executable is only limited by the RAM. In the future I could see truly open world games taking up much more than 4GB of RAM. Modded Oblivion as you know can already take up more than half that.


Tell that to Sleign (I guess you already tried actually), who claims every game he's seen in the past four years was "64-bit capable":


Supporting things like long long ints may make up 64 bits per integer, but this doesn't mean the executable is suddenly "64-bit capable"... 64-bit ints, floats, etc. are just a language feature. I've yet to install a game with a true 64-bit executable, though they certainly exist. There are just very few of them (Crysis, STALKER, ???). I don't even think Civ 5, with its separate executables for DX9/10/11 bothered to do 64-bit versions.

I'm all for 64-bit versions of games if they come with support for additional features which are not feasible/possible in 32-bit executables. There are still hardware limitations to consider. Even the latest Nvidia cards perform operations on double-precision floats at 1/4th the speed. Most GPUs are even slower at 1/8th the speed or lower. Good thing there's not a ton of reasons to use double-precision in gaming graphics (yet). On the CPU side, Sandy Bridge's new AVX extensions widen (double, actually) bandwidth to 256-bit which means 8 floats or 4 doubles per cycle. But as you can see it's still twice as fast to do single-precision math, so there's always going to be a tradeoff. But as compared to last-generation CPUs you could move from single-precision to double-precision math with no downside. The bandwidth will continue to double each time they release a successor to AVX, but there will always be the tradeoff "do I need the extra bits, or should I do this twice as fast?"

What I'm getting at is although I'm totally in support of 64-bit versions of games, I don't think there are tons of things it will benefit realistically. It gives you a huge address space, yes, but depending on your hardware 64-bit operations (or 128-bit etc) could be downright slow. A highway anology is always good here... If you want to stay at the same speed but double the size of all the cars on the highway you need to first upgrade the lanes. I'd enjoy a Skyrim version that allowed more than 2^32 nodes in its scene graph without the need for stupid LOD/pop-in/cell/interior-exterior-separation systems, for example, but we'd need the CPUs and the RAM to put up with something that large also, not just OS support.

Edit:

And other than PC exclusives, it'll hardly matter until 64-bit consoles come out, with >4GB of RAM and modern GPUs. I doubt Bethesda is going to make a ton of engine changes to Skyrim to actually make use of 64-bit on the PC.

64-bit has nothing to do with multithreading. A 64-bit executable is one that the CPU executes in 64-bit mode. This gives the program access to a larger address space (>4gb), grants the program access to the full 64 bit registers and doubles the number of available general purpose registers and xmm registers (theoretically speeding up certain more complex algorithms). The downside is that the program uses marginally more memory (primarily on account of larger pointers).

I hope that Skyrim has both 32-bit and 64-bit executables.

The Civ5 dev team confirmed that they are preparing a 64-bit version that will be available as an update, but they couldn't get it ready in time for launch date.

I didn't realize STALKER had a 64-bit mode. I purchased the game on Steam but haven't installed it yet. I will check to see whether it automatically updates to the 64-bit version.

I find the trend of jargon about what's legal or not being centered around forum policies disturbing. Companies do not define a customer's rights, and when they try to do so they tend to lose in court (Nintendo losing to Galoob, Apple losing to people unlocking their Orwellian restrictions on their mobile devices). GameFAQs for example forbids discussion of things customers are allowed to do by law, based on a court case Nintendo lost against Galoob. Fan made patches are most definitely not illegal.

Heck, products like this have even been sold in the past for Doom/Doom 2 for example.

As to the topic, does the game really need to address that much memory with mods? If so, would it be a sign of actual need or inefficient mod design? Options are a great thing, but I fail to see why this would be an important issue. I can understand people being frustrated though. Todd completely dodged this question in his reply.

Well it depends on the patch. A No CD check patch would border on illegal, but even that is ok as long as you bought the game so there is a big grey area. I'm pretty sure that you can't sell a fan patch but anyone who would bother is an idiot because someone would get it and distribute it for free because the person who made the patch doesn't have copyright on it

However, When you make an account on a forum you literally sign away your freedom of speech in some regards. That is what the ToU is. It basically says that by creating and using an account on this forum/website/etc. you agree to follow the rules set up by the owners, moderators, and whatnot and the rules can be changed at any time. They can also edit your posts, or fully remove your rights or account entirely without telling you.

The famous "4 gb patch" is only a workaround for the problem, I think. 64-bit applications can allocate up to 8 TB 12-16 gbs of memory (depending of your system).

Definitely it's better to have native 64-bit support.

You were right pre-edit. You're assuming certain motherboard configs when you say 12-16GB. With triple-channel CPUs/Mobos you can have 24GB. It's easier just to say address space is only limited by physical RAM when it comes to 64-bit executables. There will of course be a day when we have 1TB memory modules, unless we move away from the current hardware paradigm before then. There are things like ferroelectric RAM, memristors, etc. that could become both our RAM and our storage.

Everybody who is able to run the game has a 64 bit cpu, however 32 bit xp and vista is still common and I doubt they will bother with a separate version as you would need a serious moded game for it to use more than 2 GB memory, My oblivion typically uses 6-700 MB. and the idea to use more than 4GB is pretty wild.
And yes a 64 bit system can allocate far more memory than you can fit, always a motherboard restriction even on four way servers.

That's because you only have 2 gigs of total memory and your OS is limiting what any program can use. I have 3gigs and OB uses between 1.4-1.6 gigs.