More proof from other SOE teams 64Bit is the future

im not defending anything because no matter what SOE do there will be bugs to fix (and they will be fixed)

are you trying to say PS2 is a bug free game without DX11?

DX11 has nothing to do with bugs - only the programmers ability (and time) is what determines bugs

I'd rather have PhysX than Mantle.

Well you don't spread threads, you can have the process split into more threads.

But there only so much you can mutlithread a given process outside of high performance computing.

dx9 and 32bit are not the millstones around the engines neck people think they are. The millstone is having **** loads of unpredictable player entities derping around.

64 bit netcode (which is why 32 bit being dropped is actually more significant as an announcement) may reap some benefits in terms of server stability and capacity though.

If more than 5-10 on average is gained for this (and hundreds and hundreds of manhours of work) i'd be surprised.

They are both (at this time) propriety pieces of software, but they are completely different things.

Number 1 Crash cause in PS2 client is out of memory. Moving to a 64-Bit client will render that crash to null.
A 64bit client also will run faster natively on a 64bit CPU and OS than a 32bit client will. Currently on 64-bit Windows OS's a 32-Bit client is ran through an Emulator called WOW64(Windows on Windows). You remove that program layer you gain compute speed.

Oh and... 32-Bit OS users. Please return your copies to 2001. They want them back.

oh i totally agree
but with the rendering thread (just rendering alone - not anything else) it cant be split up in dx9 no matter what but its quite easy to multi thread (the rendering) in dx11 and will easily take advantage of multiple cores if DX11

im just talking about the rendering (not the physics and other stuff which is already multithreaded in ps2) i do know some things have dependencies and cant easily be split - but rendering can

:/

Not sure about that 'run faster' statement buddy. The WOW64 legacy system is not really causing any difference in performance people are going to be perceptible of.

don't get me wrong, if it going to help. Yes.

What I'm worried about, is that about 80-90% of the player base, doesn't 'do' computers. and they see dx11 and 64 bit, and see two higher numbers.

So they are expecting from the sound of the chatter, pretty big performance boosts. In reality we are looking at pretty minor ones. As i've said the introduction of 64 bit words into netcode and server side potentially interests me the most as that is something that might actually make a significant dif to server stability and capacity.

And whilst every little helps, its not going to be OMFG all over again,its largely why this has been on the backburner and not a priority for SOE for so long. The investment:return ratio is pretty low in terms of throughput in these techs as opposed to dx9/32 bit.

That will entirely depend on whether the PS4 uses it (it does, doesn't it?). (it's no coincidence all the PC improvements work equally as well on the PS4).

yep its not going to be a massive boost - both dx11 and 64bit
and yea i know what you mean - people see higher numbers and think "wow does that mean i will get double fps.!"

with BOTH i dont think i would get much more than 10/15% performance boost at best (maybe 5 fps) but what im more hoping would happen is:
64bit - they might be able to have more objects in the game world at once which means more different vehicle/bases and stuff and hopefully even bigger continents like cyssor (these are my hopes remember - im not saying this will happen) because of the ability to use more memory (im barely using 3gb atm in ps2)

dx11 i might get me more performance at the worst possible times (what seems like 150+ vs 150+ battles) because the rendering thread gets maxed out at these times and the frame latency goes flying high (into the 100's sometimes) and the fps falls to the 40's (i prefer to stay in the 100's of fps if possible)

thats the way i see it anyways - big improvements?nah, little useful ones?yeah

ps4 doesnt use any direct x
it has it own low level API which is low level LIKE mantle but it isnt mantle (its better than mantle)

well.... just becuase you can address more ram and have more of your program in primary memory, doesn't mean that transfering stuff into cache's and registers and then the CPU 'core' itself to do the computing so that the end point 'client' and user looking at a screen are aware of them (or potentially can be) is cost free. Far from it actually.

The main thing 64 bit affords, is words of enough lengh to be used in scientific calculations after all. That bit certainly can get faster. But its not like you can just pile an arbitary number of objects into a single word. Most of these 64 bit words are still going to have a ton of trailing 0's and will I imagine only every be corresponding to one entity (or part thereof) at a time.

Well this is a hard one, I can't see the source code and im certaintly not much of a render engine programmer (my efforts are luzly though). It's entirely dependent on how the current one works in terms of efficiency. And checking for culling is a ***** at the best of times.

Might we be seeing a performance increase from raising, and then compiling for, the baseline capabilities that a 64-bit CPU offers (SSE and the like)?

Mantle only works on 64bit, well, it does for BF4.

It probably won't then I guess (I read somewhere about it being able to use DirectX as well its own openGL varient, but maybe things changed).

I can understand your doubt. That's because you are operating under the assumption that WoW64 is only for legacy programs and are not quite clear on what it does. I think you need to go educate yourself on what exactly WoW64 does and while your at it go Google Performance of 32bit vs 64bit Apps in a 64bit OS envrinment. The results will surprise you. As I was when I started writing 64bit DB front end apps.

Perhaps you could provide a relevant case study as you clearly have more experience in this.

it actually can use an opengl varient that is specific for playstation called PSGL but most of the time game devs use a lower level api that is similar to mantle for direct access to the hardware
im a good 99.9999% sure it cant use direct x

except physX was already programmed (and btw is on the PTS ATM, but it does not seem to work properly, at least for me) and would thus require much less work than reprogramming the game so that it is compatible with mantle.

But yes, mantle would benefit much more to "smaller" PCs than a 64 bit client or PhysX, these latest mostly benefiting to high-end configs.

Actually I can go one better. Something you can do to see results yourself. Provided you are currently running a 64bit Windows OS.
Download and install Performance Test 8.0, it comes with both 32bit and 64bit versions in the install package.
http://www.passmark.com/download/pt_download.htm
Run the 32bit exe first. It will give you a warning that you'll get better results with the 64 bit version. Run it anyway. Save your base line result with a name denoting it's 32bit. Now run the 64bit version. When it's done load 32bit baseline file and compare the 2. You should see approx. a 20% increase between the 32bit and 64bit Passmark scores.
Feel free to browse all the stuff it tests.

BTW as an example on just the CPU Mark score on my rig(link to that in my sig)
32bit CPU Mark = 5988
64bit CPU Mark = 9382 (56.7% increase)
Interger Math increased 194%, Floating Point increased 23.3%, CPU Physics increased 20.9%
And so on and so forth. You get the idea.