Of course, ALL of that is completely irrelevant, what matters for a 64-bit client is memory! Games have been hitting the 2GB ceiling for at least six years now... saying a game won't use more than 2 Gb is simply nonsense. As I said, modded Oblivion hit that ceiling years ago, and Sacred 2 (as an example) has well known crashing issues because of that ceiling... other 32-bit games that are moddable can also be made to hit that roof. Graphics and sound 'bits' are irrelevant... and it doesn't bloody matter about the maximum value size either! The pure driving need right now is memory address space so modding won't cause crashing when the game runs out of memory when a veritable ocean of it is available in many (if not most) modern systems!

Simply put, for Skyrim to have an out of memory error when it hits 2-3 Gb on a system with, say, 8 or 12 Gb available is farcical. I can see that in Oblivion because it's older, but a modern game should be able to make use of ALL resources on modern computers, not those of computers as they were five years before the bloody game was made.

I'm curious about that, too...I imagine it'd take some work, though, and that it's not a matter of a simple recompilation.

1) Use a 64-bit version of the compiler, 2) have 64-bit versions of needed libraries, 3) make sure you haven't stored pointers in 32-bit values or 4) assume pointers are 32-bits in your code, and 5) keep an eye on alignment of structures (if the compiler isn't doing that automatically anyways). That's pretty much it, and as someone stated earlier, #2 is probably the biggest issue at this point.

Pretty much every single bigger one released this year for the PC ...

It's simple to check: If the game in question uses true HDR (instead of "faking it" with bloom and similar), it uses 48 or 64 bit textures. Not necessarily on disk (since very, very few textures actually need the added flexibility on disk; and the few cases are easier and quicker done with vertex painting and gamma correction), but for sure internally. Also, for nearly every single one of them the act of creating those textures involved working in programs with 16 or 32 bits per (floating point) colour channel, like for example Photoshop.

The reason why sound hasn't gone up is probably 1) stagnation in sound hardware advances across the board, 2) the ear can only pick up so many steps between tones, and 3) see #1 again. For what goes to the eyeballs 32-bit colour schemes are more than enough to represent anything our eye can pick out, so why bother going further?

Of course, ALL of that is completely irrelevant, what matters for a 64-bit client is memory! Games have been hitting the 2GB ceiling for at least six years now... saying a game won't use more than 2 Gb is simply nonsense.

Bulldozer is a 64-bit processor. A few custom 128bit floating point operations doesn't make it 128-bit, it's still a 64-bit processor at heart.

128-bit is not here, and it won't be for a long time.


In the 80s. But the thing is, there is no tangible benefit of going further.

The sound stopped at 16bit over 15 years ago, and we still use that for sounds and music. The graphics stopped at 32bit about a decade ago and we still use 32bit textures and resolution for displaying graphics.

With a 64bit CPU and OS the computer can store up to 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 different values. Besides extreme science, there really is no need to deal with larger numbers, certainly not consumer software like games. Which make 128bit quite irrelevant.