I'm willing to bet a vast majority of gamers have 64bit setups. I've been using it for at least 4 years now. Hardly anyone has less than 4gb of ram. It's so cheap you can buy 8gb for around $40. It's time for game developers to get with the times. This isn't a console port for crying out loud.
PlanetSide 2 is not set to handle every thread so it only uses a certain percentage of your Processor (25-40%, equal to 1 core.), etc. I'm not sure if this will get changed in the future along with the optimizations they said they will be doing, I hope so though.
It is done like this because SOE wants to use the forgelight engine for the new everquest and most MMO players buy a brand new 4 year old dell to play on......
Well, it's quite simple: Try to name 10 games which are done in 64 bit without googling for it now. Just saying, it's technically possible but no game studio goes through the effort yet. It has not caught on as monetary viable or technically essential (and cuts off 20% of the customer base who still does not have access to 64bit OS or hardware. Estimate based on a usenet discussion I read recently but I'd guess it's actually only 10% of potential customers when considering minimum hardware specs for new games). On top of that the devs are used to 32 bit development and optimizing for 64 bit forces them to learn a few things anew (as such are a bit slower than doing it the way it's been done for two decades). At least if they want to optimize for 64bit and not just make it 64bit without using increased caluclation and memory availability it provides. ;3
Who cares about the 10% of people who don't have 64bit? Their computers are probably too old to run planetside 2 anyway. People are complaining about how poorly the game is optimized and how bad it runs. I'm sure having access to more resources our computers have had for years will help out.
They can make the default 32 bit BUT have a 64 bit launcher that simply sets the game to use more of the computer's resources when running. Just like Blizzard did with World of Warcraft
You got no idea about porting applications from 32-bit to 64 bit, do you? Im not sure, but i dont think that they are programming PS2 and the engine behind this for 2 years only... guess when they started, they wanted it to run on 32bit-systems, too...
They said they're going to use ForgeLight engine on multiple MMO's, including the upcoming Everquest. And porting applications from 32-bit to 64-bit can be done in a sort of short-cut manner, like blizzard did.
There is no performance gain from 64bit WoW though. The game engine and files are not designed to take advantage of 64bit architecture. The point of using 64bit for your game is to scale everything within the game to 64bit and not allow backwards compatibility. This way you get performance increases but then again can not run it on 32bit systems at all. To the "Who cares about 10% players" comment: It's 10% less money and game companies are businesses who focus on making money. 10% is a lot. No investor would allow you to say "We will have 10-20% less customers but then again it's an awesome investment into the future!". Investing tends to go for "instant" returns as longlivety can not be guaranteed (after all a new game coming out next year might make PS2 seem old/boring/outdated when compared to it. That is risky but "We make a ton of money from the launch, no one cares how it does afterwards" is less risky).
The funny thing is that the system specs call for a minimum of 4 GB RAM and 256 MB RAM for video. 32 bit windows doesn't have enough memory addresses to fulfill those requirements. You implicitly need 64 bit Windows to run the minimum hardware for this game.
Nonsense... http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/h2k70f3s(v=vs.100).aspx just a small(!) startup...
It’s very difficult to make something 64 bit. On top of that just because it’s now a 64 bit game does not mean it will run any better then 32 bit out of the box. It still needs to be coded to allow more ram / cpu and gpu usage. We have been having this discussion since early beta. It’s the same thing as DX11. It takes a long time. Also, just because some other companies ported it to 64 bit cheaply and it 'worked' does not mean it will with this newly created engine. No one will know how it will react. Also if it all went south I bet people will be here saying, why didn’t you play it safe and use 32 bit but instead you cut corners on 'my' game and now I can't play it!
almost all games companies use the current tools and existing IP, very few are able to actually design their own framework they bandy around names like forgelight and frostbite etc but in reality theyre just another iteration of the same old engine, some new things bolted on, some new functions, shaders blah blah (infact most of the year on year advances come from our own upgrades allowing more and more polys to be spent in the scene at one time) find a team like id prepared to invest literally years into a ground up 64 bit engine then sll the other companies of scripters come devs can develop their tools and addons for that instead to do their make overs on and create games like PS4 or BF5 (actually DICE are claiming battlefield will require x64 at some point in the future but its still not clear if itll be a 64 bit game or just require it for some extensions) Mostly the public just see a fancy new box or a great trailer with non game footage and make their decisions, theres no direct monetary advantage for a second tier company like SOE to spend a ton of cash modernising an old engine themselves to a point itll reduce the customer segment they can sell to.
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey that is about the best source of actionable data around IMO. somewhere near 70% of steam gamers (which is probably a good indicator for all gamers) have 64bit operating systems. this game, more than most, really would benefit from being able to address more memory. there is a misconception and or placebo with '64bit = more performance', from a frames per second perspective there really shouldn't be any difference. if there is the likely reason for an increase would be less memory page swapping/deletion if a game is running at the maximum 2GB process/thread limitation of 32bit operating systems. if your CPU is spending less time cleaning up memory it is spending more time sending data to the GPU. 64bit would be great, however, there is room for optimizations within 32bit space. likely those optimizations will lead to more tangible performance gains too.
well i cant name 10 games,but i can tell you that iRacing has a 32bit and a 64 bit client,that run side by side,im 64bit and i can race online beside some one who is running a 32 bit client,and iRacing has been using the same engine since 2008,it does take a lot of work,but it can be done
