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walsufnir 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.

You have a notebook with 8GB RAM and use a 32-Bit-Windows? ;) The "hole" is the result of IO-devices residing also in memory and they block usable ram-areas. Again, 4GB is not the maximum for a 32-bit-system, this issue has been resolved since ages and is revolved by PAE. The maximum ram available to an application is not 3GB ram, it is in fact 2 GB, even with all applications closed because there are more "applications" running than you started ;) The processor doesn't even know "application", it knows a "context".