Why is this discussion still ongoing? A 64 bit executable is not needed when the game will not need more than 4 GB of RAM. I expect even with numerous graphics enhancers that this game will only use around 2GB. Also 32 bit will be around for a long long time. There is simply to much invested in it at the moment.



The market in the early 90's is much different from the market today.

But part of the benefit of consoles and handhelds is you don't have to constantly worry about getting the newest hardware.

Then you remember wrongly, cause Windows 95 ran the majority of DOS/Windows 3.1 software just fine. DOS games only stopped working well with XP, but even there most of the Windows 3.1 software worked as intended. It was first when the 64-bit Windows was released that the DOS/Windows 3.1 software really stopped to work.

W8 Server OS will support 128bit and will have no 32bit support. AMD's new CPU bulldozer out next month and their Llano APU which is available now both support 128bit operation. 128bit is here and it is going to push 32bit out.




I remember this as well....



... I guess I remember wrongly as well then. I do recall having issues, I may have been unlucky..

Not that different. When the tech becomes old and outdated and better stuff is readily available, you drop the old and move forward. Some of the higher end software is already doing that. A lot of your graphics software is available as both 32 bit and 64 bit and some of them are already dropping 32 bit entirely. The rest of the market will likely follow. Especially if it's given a nudge by the OS dropping it. People will just have to keep using their old systems and old programs, or they'll upgrade and move forward with the superior tech.

As an aside, when was the last time anyone saw an 8 bit OS?

EVERY game on Steam is only 32bit. Steam does not support 64 bit, yet I run all my games just fine (Shogun 2, Witcher 2, etc).

Don't forget that modern CPUs process 64-bit instructions slightly faster~

Yea. That was why several weeks ago, I stated on one of the threads here that the console to pc port route Bethesda took with developing Skyrim was one of the things that concerned me the most.

Not really, if the old crap still works. My dad uses a PC from 2002 to this day, and it still works fine for him. He just takes good care of it.

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.

Well, all I can say is someone at Beth should go tell Microsoft they are doing it all wrong and we all need to go back to Win 3.1 till they are ready to release a new 64 bit Xbox. Just who does the rest of the world think they are moving forward while the 360 and PS3 drown themselves in obsolescence? :thumbsup: The nerve....

*fixed

PCs always have the best quality if you pit even a little bit of time and effort into it. On the lowest of wages you can still build a computer that out classes PS3/360.

On the lowest of wages.

Sure, I have my PC I built in 2002, too. I don't use it much anymore, though, because it lacks the power I need for a lot of what I do, but it still runs. But it's also running Windows 2000 Professional.

Yep. Cheaper games make up for the initial price difference.

Yes but we arent talking about running excel and solitaire...

I think it is complete BS that I got merged with the other topic. The only reason I made the topic is because I thought this specific issue required specific attention instead of the issue getting buried in the back pages. I would rather my topic was just closed so that the issue could of stood out rather than get diluted in peripheral issues.

That was a low move Bethesda.

I'm not the one who merged it, but what you're talking about is really no issue. Simply because there will be no 128-bit Windows and there will be no drop of 32-bit support.

I mean, really, that rumor is 2 years old now. It wouldn't be particulary hard for you to find oh so many places on the internet who debunked it already. Cause it's fake.

He's not kidding. Save money for a little while, and you can.

I built my first off of a summer working minimum wage.

Given that mods were making Oblivion smack against the 2Gb ceiling, and that was years ago... yeah, we need a 64-bit Skyrim for modders / mod users. Likewise, 64-bit processors have been around for years too... isn't it about time that game companies started supporting the damned things?

Can you even BUY 32-bit processors for computers other than cheap, bottom end laptops and desktops anymore? (And by bottom end, I mean cheaper-than-a-console bottom end.)

Erm, no. We (as in: people programming the graphic cards ) actually mostly use 48 bit textures (no idea what "resolution" has to do with that) for graphics, usually with three 16 bits floating point values ("binary16" IEEE 754 format) per channel for red, green and blue colour values; with the occasional 16 bit floating point alpha thrown in as well (see texture formats like D3DFMT_A16B16G16R16F in DX3D documentation). They are usually in OpenEXR or TIFF if you want to save those to a file. On output, we just use tone mapping to map it to whatever colour space the output device supports, which isn't necessary sRGB with 8 bits per channel either. HDMI 1.3 specifications allows for colour depths of 10, 12 and 16 bits per colour channel, and there are displays capable of showing them as well as graphic cards capable of producing this output.

I know, but tell me one game that use those kind of textures or use a resolution that is higher than 32-bit

"Best quality" of graphics or gameplay? I remember how Oblivion was used as an tech demo for HDR, and that ended up being overrated and made the game's other shortcomings really stand out more. At least handheld games don't have to worry about HD graphics getting in the way of gameplay.

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.

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.

Ummm... no. HDR uses 32-bit floating point per *colour element* (i.e. 96-bit (!), plus alpha format mapped into a 32-bit colour display scheme scaled to a 'light tolerance' range, to paraphrase it), so we have gone beyond 32-bit per colour graphical representations. Likewise, most sound mixing now is done using 24-32 bit samples at ridiculously high sampling rates which are then scaled down for use.

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? (i.e. that's why HDR internally uses 96+bits, and what we see is still 24-bit + alpha)

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.