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Homeroids on 03 April 2013
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ethomaz said:
Homeroids said:

He made a good point about the 32bit vs 64bit. Even though a good percentage of PC owners have Windows 7 which is predominately 64bit, as far as I know, all PC games are 32bit executables which does restrict memory addressing to a max of 4GB. Was just searching the web to see if there is such thing as a Crysis 3 64bit EXE. I don't think there is. Though Crytek recommend a PC with 8GB, this would ensure the EXE gets a full 4GB with Windows having access for the rest. But I would think if any developer makes a cross platform game, most likely it will be native 32bit because of PC legacy.

Interesting point though. Does this mean in theory, that PS4 and 720 games could always be compiled in 64bit which equates to the full memory being adressible? This was all irrelevant with the last consoles since RAM was so small.

I think in the PS4, there will be a reserve or portion of the 8GB GDDR5 for the system; who knows, maybe 2GB, but I think it is safe to assume that gaming on the PS4 can access more than the 32bit limit of 4GB.

A 32bits system can't see 4GB because there is hardware allocation address memory... my notebook even with 8GB RAM can see only 2.9GB with Windows 32bits... that's depends of the hardware manufacturer (mine is Lenovo)... the max I see a Windows 32bits using memory was 3.5GB even so the Windows XP uses ~500MB... so ~3GB for game if you have any other application closed.

4GB is the theorical maximum for 32bits system... in fact the number is lower than that.

I agree with you all games uses 32bits executables but not only that the dynamic libraries used (DLL) by the executable to accesse the SO resourcers are 32bits too... I think it is hard to create a full 64bits game today because you will have to convert everything created and used for the game in 64bits too.

And even the Windows 8 have 32bits version yet... sad but true.

A full 32bit (ie hardware and O/S) cannot see the 4GB at all. I agree. Windows 32bit will only allow up to about 3GB for one program. If you read carefully what I said on a 64bit machine with a 64 bit O/S, programs can now access more than 4GB if the EXE is also 64 bit. However, no games are currently 64 bit. So there are 3 conditions:

1. 64 bit hardware

2. 64 bit O/S

3. 64 bit executable

In the case of modern games on a full 64 bit platform, the absolute limit the executable will address is 2 to the power of 32 or 4GB. So when Crytek recommend Crysis 3 on an 8GB system they are in effect saying that we can use almost a complete 4gb for just the game EXE. No more. But you still need to satisfy points 1 and 2 above.

Also, one reason game makers don't create 64 bit exe's is because the fact is Windows XP is still a very popular O/S.

64 bit applications are far more important with things like SQL.