What's the situation regarding the 64bit executable?

[louisv]

That's just it, because a lot of people still run in 32bit (even if the hardware has been 64bit since the later models of Pentium IVs), the devs have to keep the two versions very similar and will not really take advantage of the wider data path until a large majority have made the move.

Then programmers will be able to make bigger programs.

Remember the days of 16bit ? The 286, 386 ?

Programs were quite a bit smaller then, with an address space of 2 to the 16th power being 64K on the 8088, the first PCs. The 286 and 386 had a bigger space of 1MB, or 20bit of address space.

So to recap,

16bit: 64KB of memory
32bit: 4GB
64bit: 18.4 X 10^9 GB or about 18.4 Giga GB or 18.4 Exabytes

18.4EB is a big number, I wonder when we will go 128 !

[ZaltysZ]

Originally Posted by louisv

Remember the days of 16bit ? The 286, 386 ?

Programs were quite a bit smaller then, with an address space of 2 to the 16th power being 64K on the 8088, the first PCs. The 286 and 386 had a bigger space of 1MB, or 20bit of address space.

8088 had 16-bit registers, so only 16-bit long addresses were possible, what gave those 64KB. However, there were also possible to use segmented memory access, which combined segment selector and offset to allow access more memory than 64KB. Hardware had means to use 20-bit address space (1MB), which could be accessible by software via segmented access. Usually 640KB were available to user, and upper region were used by BIOS.

268 and 386 added 24-bit and 32-bit protected modes respectively, whose extended available address spaces to 16MB and 4GB.

[Igo kyu]

Originally Posted by ZaltysZ

8088 had 16-bit registers, so only 16-bit long addresses were possible, what gave those 64KB. However, there were also possible to use segmented memory access, which combined segment selector and offset to allow access more memory than 64KB. Hardware had means to use 20-bit address space (1MB), which could be accessible by software via segmented access. Usually 640KB were available to user, and upper region were used by BIOS.

268 and 386 added 24-bit and 32-bit protected modes respectively, whose extended available address spaces to 16MB and 4GB.

That's almost right, but probably due to language differences, it doesn't read quite correctly to me.

Segmented memory addressing was standard on the early IBM compatible PCs.

The Intel 8086 (16 bit) started segmented addressing which gave it one megabyte of address space, then Intel made the 8088 (which was in some ways an 8 bit chip though it used 16 bit registers, as the 8086 and the earlier "8 bit" chips had). Because the 8088 was sort of 8 bit, though it had a one megabyte address space like the 8086, it used cheaper 8 bit support chips, and IBM chose the 8088 for their PC, presumably because the support chips (which wouldn't necessarily come from Intel in the case of either CPU) for the 16 bit 8086 were more expensive.

Segmented memory addressing was such a mess, it gave Intel a legitimate six month lead over the Motorola 68000, but that mess kept running for five or ten years due to "IBM compatibility".

[louisv]

Originally Posted by ZaltysZ

268 and 386 added 24-bit and 32-bit protected modes respectively, whose extended available address spaces to 16MB and 4GB.

I was writing from memory...but I stand corrected.

[Antoninus]

Originally Posted by louisv

That's just it, because a lot of people still run in 32bit (even if the hardware has been 64bit since the later models of Pentium IVs), the devs have to keep the two versions very similar and will not really take advantage of the wider data path until a large majority have made the move.

According to the latest Steam hardware survey already 60+ % of users have an 64 Bit OS. Among the users with PCs that can satisfactorily run CloD the percentage is probably much higher. All new PCs have at least 4 GB RAM or mostly much more. If any software wants to fully utilize these amounts memory it has to be 64 bit.

CloD development started 7 years ago and thats perhaps the biggest reason why something that should become the foundation of a new series of flightsims for the next decade is still a 32 bit application. I doubt they would loose many sales without a 32 bit exe. Casual gamers with outdated hardware probably don't look for a hardcore sim, but something like WoP.

Originally Posted by Skoshi Tiger

Since the Track IR software was fixed and I was able to use the 64bit version I haven't really noticed any boost in performance on my system.

64 bit is good to have, but the software has to take advantage of the extra memory space.

If you only have 4 GB RAM installed there is no extra memory that 64 bit DCS A10 can use.

[ATAG_Doc]

64 bit is the de facto standard now for personal computing.

[Madfish]

It doesn't really matter if it's standard or not.

Until CloD uses more than 4gb ram we wouldn't really benefit. It only makes sense or is required if the application is actually USING more than 4gb of ram for itself. The OS and other applications don't matter.

I'm running on 16gb here and usually I have a crazy number of applications etc. running. Combined they use the memory but each application only a small chunk. So the applications themselves can be anything - just the OS has to be a x64 version and you don't have to worry about memory issues anymore, if you got a decent amount of ram that is.

[ATAG_Snapper]

Originally Posted by Madfish

It doesn't really matter if it's standard or not.

Until CloD uses more than 4gb ram we wouldn't really benefit. It only makes sense or is required if the application is actually USING more than 4gb of ram for itself. The OS and other applications don't matter.

I'm running on 16gb here and usually I have a crazy number of applications etc. running. Combined they use the memory but each application only a small chunk. So the applications themselves can be anything - just the OS has to be a x64 version and you don't have to worry about memory issues anymore, if you got a decent amount of ram that is.

When playing CoD I frequently have Task Manager running on a second screen (as well as the EVGA gpu monitor utility) and it usually shows at least 4.5 Gigs of memory in use - frequently more! There are all kinds of applications running in the background, plus for the sim itself I'm running TrackIR5, Ventrilo, Voice Commander, etc.

If I were running Win 7 32-bit and only had 4 Gigs of RAM on my machine (as many in this forum have), would this not be a memory bottleneck? Could this be a reason for performance and stability problems reported for CoD? Perhaps CoD itself uses less than 4 Gigs of RAM, but add in the other applications combined with the 4 Gig limitation of Win 7 (or Vista) 32-bit and you encounter a drastic memory shortage?

[Blackdog_kt]

What you say does happen Snapper, but it's a case of overall RAM management, ie a matter of having enough RAM and a 64-bit OS to use it.

If the sim doesn't use more than 3 GB for example (the entire game folder is about 4 gigs), having a 64-bit executable for the sim won't matter much. What matters is having more than that and an OS that can "see" it so you can give CoD the assumed 3GB it needs and have enough left to run whatever else you need to run in the background

[ATAG_Snapper]

Thanks for the clarification, BD. From my layman's perspective, in terms of memory "more" won't necessarily help, but it won't hurt either.