You mean like consoles which are just simplistic computers? By the time Skyrim comes out the XBox will be almost 6 years old.

Yes, but at least consoles are plug-and-play rigs, what I'm trying to say is that PC users have a wide range of different rigs. Consoles may be outdated, but they're very predictable in the way they'll behave. If they're going to make a PC friendly release, the game has to be stable on almost a decade worth of hardware. Which means very old systems all the way up to the latest video cards. And that also includes OS upgrades.

The engine shouldn't be running on compatibility mode. That's almost like making a DOS based game for Winwdows 95 in 2001 and ask all XP and NT users to use emulators.

As I said, some of the 4GB was taken up by the system. I keep forgetting that Windows doesn't properly handle PAE, though. But still, a 32-bit app on a 64-bit OS has the same benefit as with PAE (as in, it can have its own physical memory area that's not completely shared with other 32-bit apps, assuming there's enough on the system).

I agree it would be rather stupid to develop a whole new engine just to limit it on other areas of interest.
But from what I understand, it takes A LOT of work to make something 64-bit.

I guess Bethesda just have to weigh the amount of required work (work = time = money) to the amount of performance gain and positive reception by PC-players.

Well undoubtedly the game will be supported on Win7. I don't think they will let PC users down even with the game going to be mostly a console port. It probably wont take advantage of the most current tech, as they basically developed the engine within the past 5 years, and they are more in to the game making business and not the engine development side. Though their next game I would be disappointed if it didn't at least use DX10.

only time will tell.

No, actually, it doesn't. Compile for 64 bit, and assuming all their dependencies aren't closed source and 32bit they shouldn't have any issue. A 64 bit executable has one advantage: It can address numbers higher than 2^32, and lower than 2^64. That's it. Nothing magic.

It doesn't need to go 64 bit.
The profit of a 64bit OS is that it can see more than 4 gb of ram.
Modern games are build in order to run at modern consoles that only have 512mb ram.
So there wouldn't be any real profit if the game was 64bit since it doesn't need more ram.

The only game that has come at 64bit version is Crysis,because it needs to load the whole level at RAM,and it's textures have too much detail that RAM is important.
Until consoles have the technology to run games like Crysis we will not see 64bit games. (well except from Crysis)

But I hope that the game will utilize multi core technology.
I have a 4core 3.2ghz Phenom2 sitting idle at most games.

yeah, and bring back the flintlock rifle!
it served us so well, we dont need all these modern 'machine gun' phewy!

I dont think this topic has anything to do with consoles - especially since I created the topic. If anything, I think PC users hold themselves back with a 10 yo OS.

Secret video footage of Skyrim 64.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POOMF_klGoY

I blame Sony's ludicrous marketing for the common misconception that the Cell processor is some seven core behemoth or something. If it was it wouldn't be so hard for companies to port things to. Instead those SPEs or whatever they are called have to be specifically designed for and any random thread can't be thrown at them.

As to the earlier explanation of Vista/7 I can understand that, so I can understand a multi-threaded game engine and an optional use 64 bit executable, but I can't understand any desire to not support XP with Skyrim. Since Skyrim will be on the PS3/Xbox 360 it does not make sense if it is designed to ONLY run on newer machines. Better options are good but barring the game from a significant potential user base wouldn't be a good move either.

I know many would disagree with me, but I think it's a good thing the game consoles are holding things back on the PC. It forces developers to do more with lesser resources, much like was seen in the NES/Genesis/SNES/N64/PS1 days where later generation titles looked significantly better than earlier titles on the same hardware. PC gaming just kind of throws more and more processing requirements at the machine as hardware advances without taking better care to make stuff look better with limited hardware. This long console generation has shifted that paradigm and that is an excellent thing in my opinion. Again I think options for more powerful PCs are great, but I don't think those options should come at the exclusion of PCs that are not high end.


XP isn't ten years old for one, and for two DX10 doesn't look THAT much better that PC users are "holding themselves back" with XP either. I don't have numbers to back it up, but I also highly doubt that people using newer machines are running XP as a primary OS. I know when I put together a computer next it will use Windows 7 (never Vista though). It actually has everything to do with consoles, but in this case I think holding things back has a positive effect on the industry by letting a larger pool of potential customers experience the product.

Aah, memories. If Skyrim makes half as much of an impact on release as that game did, Bethesda have got nothing to worry about.

Skyrim 64bit? I'd like to see Skyrim 64kb.
Or 96kb.

Mario 64 made an impact 'cause it was the first game ever utilizing anologue sticks having switchable 3d camera,and actually being the first ever 3d platformer.
It was the first of a completely new generation in gaming,the 3d generation,and when people saw it's graphics went "WOOOOWW THAT'S F******* AWSOME,ALMOST TRUE !!"

Actually the reason people today call "camera" the feature of 3d games that lets you control the angle from which you see the action,is because at Mario 64 a Lakitu guy was following you with a camera covering Mario's actions and you where actually moving the Lakitu holding the camera around every time you changed the angle.

But it's too difficult to make a game to utilize so many new features today.

This is not true. 64-bit programs have a larger address space. Yes, one of the effects of a larger address space is the ability to use more RAM but you can do other things too, such as use memory-mapped file IO for large files. Memory-mapped file IO allows you to map files to a program's memory space and access them as if they were memory. In a lot of instances, it's significantly faster than using stream-based IO (there are a number of reasons for this but it primary has to do with moving file operations to the kernel space since the kernel handles memory mapping and the fact that with standard stream-based IO, you have to copy the file to memory and then seek through it from start to finish to find the part you want). This means faster load times, especially in a heavily modded game. Unfortunately, with only a 32-bit address space (and this being further limited by the 2gb split), it's not possible to memory map large files in their entirety forcing you to either memory map only parts or rely on slower stream-based IO.

In addition, 64-bit mode doubles the number of general-purpose and SSE registers (from 8 to 16), which allows for the potential of faster calculations.



It's not possible to make DX10/DX11 compatible with Windows XP without basically gutting Windows XPs graphic subsystem. DirectX 10 drivers operate in user space whereas Windows XP drivers operate in kernel space. DirectX 10 drivers also expect a compositor, something XP doesn't have. Doing such would be a nightmare from a support standpoint; remember how bad Windows Vista was with graphics support when it came out? Now imagine that a patch for Windows XP came out and basically broke all your graphics drivers. (And no, it wouldn't be possible to simply use Windows Vista/7 drivers without gutting more parts of the operating system and then you'd basically have turned Windows XP into Windows Vista anyways.) You could wrap DirectX 10 and translate it's calls to DirectX 9 or OpenGL, like WINE does on Linux, but this would also be a support nightmare because you'll never get 100% compatibility with that kind of setup which would basically force game developers to write three versions of their games (DX9, DX10/XP, and DX10-11/Vista-7).



This is only true if the LAA program is running on a 64-bit operating system (32-bit programs are mapped to a 64-bit address space on x64 Windows which means that they technically get 64tib of user and 64tib of kernel address space but the 32-bit program can't see more than the first 4gb). If it's running on a 32-bit system, it still has a 2gb address limit unless you toggle the /3GB flag (you can't have 4GB because you still need some space for the kernel). But this is not recommended, especially if you have large amounts of video RAM as the kernel half is where that goes.



Windows does properly handle PAE and if you use a 32-bit version of Windows Server, you will be able to use PAE in it's entirety. PAE is hardcoded to be disabled on consumer versions of IA-32 Windows not because Window's PAE support is broken but because there are a lot of poorly written and broken drivers. PAE mode changes the physical address space to 48-bits (although application programs still receive a 32-bit address space). A lot of 32-bit drivers have poorly written, hard-coded assumptions and break when the address space is suddenly changed from what they are expecting. This primarily has to do with drivers that use pointer arithmetic where they don't detect the address space size and adjust the algorithm accordingly. Such as casting (converting) a pointer (a pointer is basically just a memory address) to an integer rather than an INT_PTR. (int is 32-bits on both 32 and 64-bit systems which means on a 64-bit system, the 64-bit pointer will be truncated when it's cast.)

Originally, PAE support was fully functional with Windows XP but they patched that out in Service Pack 1 because it was breaking too many things and causing issues.

The first one is just an advantage of addressing more memory, though. The latter is true, and I probably should have mentioned it.

I bought a decent gaming comp three years ago I think, my senior year in HS, for about a grand. I little more because I also bough a monitor because my previous one was [censored]. I am planning on buying/buildinga new one this year for skyrim and I will probably sell my current one to my brother which is fine for him. It can play Crysis and just about any game out now, not always at highest but fairly well soo I think I will end up spending less than $500 this year on my computer.

I used to think that constantly upgrading my comp was a pain and I would never fall into that trap, but it seems fairly cheap now that I have started. Granted I don't buy a new Graphics card every gen or upgrade my processor every time a new set comes out but I think it is working out fairly well for me...

The problem with Apple doing that is after the latest version of an OS comes out you have to pay to upgrade or they stop supporting your system. My family almost lost our house because of this. Let me regale you in a tale...

My parent's had an OS X 10.1 for a few years. They bought it on the advice of my brother, who to be honest knows more about different kinds of weed pipes than anything to do with technology. Anyways, my dad got laid off due to the lack of construction jobs in the recession. He had finally found another job, but needed to retake his OSHA certification to be hired. He had a few days or the offer would have passed and we were already behind in bills and close to bankruptcy. There were no local classes that were just starting for him to take but luckily there was a Flash version you could use through an OSHA website. My dad signed up and tried to get on the site. We didn't have the latest version of Flash.

My family is not nearly as technologically experienced as I am, so my dad asked me to take a look. I went on the Adobe website and it said something similar to "The latest version of Flash is not supported by anything below OS X 10.3" The upgrade was relatively cheap, and I offered to pay for it. However then I got to the site it said that our computer was not compatible with the latest OS version. Then I remembered the dusty old XP my uncle gave me a while back. It was in my closet, just chilling out as I didn't have a monitor at the time. I called a friend, borrowed his extra monitor and got the old thing booted. I connected to the internet and updated Flash. Boom, the site loads fine and a few days later my dad was employed again. That is why, besides lack of gaming and other such quarrels you hear between Mac and PC I am a PC loyalist tried and true.

Also, I think PC applications have to be made for the latest OS and the fact that it runs on older systems is merely because they are so similar. The only bugs that are unique between a game and OS usually reside in the fact it is an old game on a new OS or a new game on an old OS.

You know, you don't have to buy each new generation of XXXXXX just because it has been released...a bit of upgrade planning here and there is nice.

I've skipped Vista, and upgraded from XP 32 to W7 SP1 64. And I've also skipped the 2xx and 4xx Geforce GPUs, and plan to update from a 9600GT to a 580GTX...

I'm still running a 9600GT on my rig, and its still a decent GPU, and run 32bit XP. I dont have any problems with it, and XP is probably the best OS of all time to the present. Windows 7 is nice yes, and probably will be better than XP, and when I upgrade my PC this summer, I will get the 64 bit version. Why? As computing evolves, the software evolves, but it isn't there at this time. 32 bit will still be the main program for probably another year, possibly two.

Hope so too, seeing as most PC users use a Quad-based (Intel/AMD) system. It seems quad is the standard.

It's a good GPU indeed. Crysis@1280x800 at Very High settings with more than decent FPS verifies that.

Memory in the physical sense (I.E RAM) is different from memory mapped files. Memory mapped files are similar to the concept of a page file; you take a file and map it so that you access it as you would RAM. The only difference is that memory-mapped files aren't being used as an extension of physical memory space.

The normal way to access a file is to copy that file to memory and then read it from a stream. This is not easy to do on large files; that 15-gigabyte ESM file would be impossible to copy to memory on a 32-bit process and would require lots of RAM on a 64-bit process. With memory-mapped file IO, every byte in the file has a corresponding address in the program's virtual address space. This means that you can access the file as if it were in RAM, without having to first copy the file to userspace memory. Instead of having to copy the file to userspace buffers, you just access the relevant memory addresses. With 32-bit executables, the address space limitations mean this has be done in chunks, which induces more overhead. With a 64-bit executable, you can just map the entire file all at once.

64 bit version huh? Alright.
Well here's http://wiimedia.ign.com/wii/image/article/760/760189/super-mario-64-virtual-console-20070131013945074_640w.jpg
This is a http://images.wikia.com/nintendo/en/images/7/75/Klump.jpg
Oh! Here's an http://img.brothersoft.com/screenshots/softimage/y/yoshi.s_story-254317-1246350887.jpeg in Rift

I imagine theres only going to be a version equal the the 360 at launch for marketing reasons(or maybe they signed a deal, who knows). I wouldnt write off Vista/Win7 and dx10/11 patches though.