AMD Teams Up With Atari To Deliver 64-Bit Firepower

[klah]

http://home.businesswire.com/p...006090&newsLang=en

Sept. 21, 2004--
AMD64 technology powers first 64-bit game available on retail shelves

Today, AMD (NYSE:AMD) announces the first 64-bit game optimized for AMD Athlon(TM) 64 processor-based systems, "Shadow Ops: Red Mercury," is available now on retail shelves. "Shadow Ops: Red Mercury," published by Atari and designed on AMD64 technology, includes specific 64-bit enhancements that enable a richer and more immersive gaming experience. The power of the AMD64 platform has opened the door for game developers to truly capture the imagination and creativity of artists and industry visionaries.

"AMD Athlon 64 technology is revolutionizing game design and, given the tremendous power and freedom AMD64 offers to our game designers, we are able to create scenes, physics, artificial intelligence, map sizes and graphics detail that we only dreamed of on 32-bit platforms," said Wim Stocks, executive vice president, sales and marketing at Atari. "Using 32-bit code alone, we were unable to offer THX 5.1 acoustic sound with every level of detail enabled and still maintain a playable game; with AMD64 64-bit technology we can now do that and much more."

32-bit vs 64-bit comparison:
http://www.atari.com/shadowops/us/amd.html

 

[yhelothar]

I don't get the comparison. It just looks a bit brighter on the 64bit version. What does the processor have to do with how bright the game is?
BS marketing. :disgust:

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: virtualgames0
I don't get the comparison. It just looks a bit brighter on the 64bit version. What does the processor have to do with how bright the game is?
BS marketing. :disgust:

Just marketing BS.
Should give a nice performance boost though.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Sunner

Originally posted by: virtualgames0
I don't get the comparison. It just looks a bit brighter on the 64bit version. What does the processor have to do with how bright the game is?
BS marketing. :disgust:

Just marketing BS.
Should give a nice performance boost though.

If it's not BS then what they would be talking about is "dynamic range" and "bit depth".

I don't know much about 3-d programming and such, but I know a bit about imaging and graphics.

Take Doom3 for instance, in order to avoid artifacts popping up in the colors when you have layers of different colored lights and shadows being calculated together dynamicly you need to have a certain amount of bit depth in order to do the calculations cleanly. So id uses 16bit per pixel color depth, or in other words 48bit color. You add a aplha channel to that for transparencies then thats.... (drum roll please...) 64bit colors.

So say you wanted to do caculations on a bunch of texture all at once, then you'd have to do it in 64bit data sizes. So you have several choices on a 32bit platform:

you can split each item up into different color channels, and have to proccess each texture 4 times

or maybe combine green with blue and red with alpha.. so you have 2 32bit calculations to do instead of 4 16bit ones

Or you can leave it a extra long data size and then have the cpu deal with the caclulations itself were it would do something like proccess the data type twice using 32bits and calculate the answers back into 64bits...
( however, I have no real idea on how that works)



But needless to say that is not ideal. If you compress it down to 32bits, and just calculate 8bits per channel, then you risk running out of numbers and ending up with a white pixels on what should be a black texture... or something like that. Whatever.

Think about doing math on 8bit datatypes, using only 8 bit datatypes... doing stuff like multiplication or division.. or maybe doing a xnor with 3 different 8bit layers of the same color channel. (not that I know much about it mind you.. just little bits here and their)


However even though the 64bit CPU wouldn't neccisarially be clock for clock faster, it's larger data types would allow it to do the same amount in one pass that would take a 32bit cpu 3-4 passes.

The same thing for sound, and this I know for a fact.

For instance I am using Linux on my laptop, it has a cheapo little onboard everything (intel i830 or i855 chipset) so that the sound card/chipset has absolutely no hardware mixing features.

So if I was using OSS drivers I would only be able to play one sound at a time, which sucks for a multimedia type desktop. However thanks to ALSA I can use a dmix plugin that creates sound devices for my user that enables software mixing.

Now this software mixing happens in 32bits. When I have 1 or 2 things going it sounds fine. When I have 3-4 things going it still sounds ok. But when I have more then that then the software mixer can't do it right, everything sounds digitized like I was on a old soundblaster 16 card. The mixer is simply running out of numbers to do the mixing and thus some sound information is just lost. At least that's what I think is happenning.


Also you have dynamic range, which means the ability for a image to consist of all colors from highlights to midranges to shadows. So if I have a scene that is fairly bright, or fairly dark everything looks normal. However if I have a scene that has the full range of possible colors from very bright white to very dark shadows then on a 32bit cpu the floating point calculations needed to generate the scene will make it look flat.. it will have to choose to work on more on the bright end of the scale or the dark end of the scale and simply lose the information at the other end. (or concentrate on the mid-ranges and loose highlights and deep shadows.)

However on a 64bit cpu I could do caclulations that would easily encompass the full range of light and color without even blinking the eye. It's floating point data types will just have much more numbers to play around with. (what is AMD64 floating point data types? 128bits?)

Now the sucky part about this game, unless they release it for LInux/Mac only, it's going to be running in 32bit compatability mode, with a 32bit kernel, with 32bit drivers, in a 32bit OS with probably the same datatypes as any old Intel x86 cpu.

So I don't think that's it's complete marketing BS. Probably only about 60-75% of it is pure BS, which seems about par for the course for the average press release from any modern corporation.

(here is a article talking about scanners in regards to dynamic range vs bit rates)

 

[Sunner]

Oh man that's a long post...gonna have to read that later....

 

[biostud]

Originally posted by: virtualgames0
I don't get the comparison. It just looks a bit brighter on the 64bit version. What does the processor have to do with how bright the game is?
BS marketing. :disgust:

ehhh lots of more detail on the textures.....look at the gun and the clothing

 

[jrphoenix]

Another Link: AMD

My question... is this game any good? Do you have to be using the 64 bit Windows beta to play the game?

 

[Lonyo]

Originally posted by: biostud666

Originally posted by: virtualgames0
I don't get the comparison. It just looks a bit brighter on the 64bit version. What does the processor have to do with how bright the game is?
BS marketing. :disgust:

ehhh lots of more detail on the textures.....look at the gun and the clothing

But what does that have to do with AMD-64? Surely that's mostly graphics settings....

 

[Elcs]

Originally posted by: Lonyo

Originally posted by: biostud666

Originally posted by: virtualgames0
I don't get the comparison. It just looks a bit brighter on the 64bit version. What does the processor have to do with how bright the game is?
BS marketing. :disgust:

ehhh lots of more detail on the textures.....look at the gun and the clothing

But what does that have to do with AMD-64? Surely that's mostly graphics settings....

Despite me having no knowledge on the subject, my rather interested 'average-joe' question would be.... do the 64-bit extensions allow more graphically challenging computations to be processed which would relate to an improved look?

 

[Bateluer]

I thought the OS had to be able to take advantage of 64 bit code before software code take advantage of it?

 

[klah]

Originally posted by: Bateluer
I thought the OS had to be able to take advantage of 64 bit code before software code take advantage of it?

You have to be running the beta 64-bit Wnidows to use the 64-bit version of this game.

 

[biostud]

Originally posted by: Elcs

Originally posted by: Lonyo

Originally posted by: biostud666

Originally posted by: virtualgames0
I don't get the comparison. It just looks a bit brighter on the 64bit version. What does the processor have to do with how bright the game is?
BS marketing. :disgust:

ehhh lots of more detail on the textures.....look at the gun and the clothing

But what does that have to do with AMD-64? Surely that's mostly graphics settings....

Despite me having no knowledge on the subject, my rather interested 'average-joe' question would be.... do the 64-bit extensions allow more graphically challenging computations to be processed which would relate to an improved look?

I would have thought that as well, but besides that I can't see any difference

With the one-two punch of AMD64 processors and "Shadow Ops: Red Mercury," gamers will notice larger and more detailed areas to explore, breakthrough artificial intelligence (AI), and never-before-seen textures that compel players to gawk in amazement.

 

[LocutusX]

I was in the presence of someone's computer which had the, uh, "demo" installed. It's a POS. The actual game is like UT (the original!) with the "Strike Force" mod. Geez, I was just trying to get over how bad the graphics were in CoD:UO, and then I had to see this. The single-player is especially atrocious (think a budget version of the first SoF) and the multiplayer is like I just said... UT with a counter-terrorist mod. Move along folks, nothing to see here.

 

[randumb]

I can't see a difference, but I guess it'll run faster.

 

[Elcs]

Originally posted by: biostud666

Originally posted by: Elcs

Originally posted by: Lonyo

Originally posted by: biostud666

Originally posted by: virtualgames0
I don't get the comparison. It just looks a bit brighter on the 64bit version. What does the processor have to do with how bright the game is?
BS marketing. :disgust:

ehhh lots of more detail on the textures.....look at the gun and the clothing

But what does that have to do with AMD-64? Surely that's mostly graphics settings....

Despite me having no knowledge on the subject, my rather interested 'average-joe' question would be.... do the 64-bit extensions allow more graphically challenging computations to be processed which would relate to an improved look?

I would have thought that as well, but besides that I can't see any difference

With the one-two punch of AMD64 processors and "Shadow Ops: Red Mercury," gamers will notice larger and more detailed areas to explore, breakthrough artificial intelligence (AI), and never-before-seen textures that compel players to gawk in amazement.

I can tell the difference and to me, its absolutely huge. If 64 bit Vs. 32 bit can do that without breaking a sweat or degrading performance to unplayable or less than acceptable levels then Im all for it.

Give me Windows64 now!!!

P.S. Give me an AMD-64 system too please

 

[drag]

Ya well, you windows guys wait for the 64bit os to go with your 64bit computer, and we Linux geeks wait for the 64bit games to with our 64bit OS and 64bit computers.


More and more I am beginning to think that WinXP-64 is going to be released sometime in 2006 and be called "longhorn". Since longhorn has lost most of it's "longhorn-ness" and is mostly a WinXP upgrade (like WinXP was of W2k) it seems to make sense to me. A AMD64 port of WinXP seems to have very little benifit to MS, plus the support headaches would be enormous. Probably be easier and more profitable to simply release a "new" OS under a different name and pricing sceme.

 

[LocutusX]

Originally posted by: Elcs

I can tell the difference and to me, its absolutely huge. If 64 bit Vs. 32 bit can do that without breaking a sweat or degrading performance to unplayable or less than acceptable levels then Im all for it.

Give me Windows64 now!!!

P.S. Give me an AMD-64 system too please

the 64-bit ver. of this game is a silly marketing gimmick. even in the 32-bit game, the levels are ridiculously small - we're talking a fraction of the current level sizes of Far Cry, UT2004, CoD:UO. if they even doubled (or tripled) the levels, it would just reach the size of levels in other games. as for the screenshots posted on the game company's site, basically they're using a higher texture level with shadows enabled. that has nothing to do with 32-bit/64-bit... a good engine can do that on any CPU with the right video card (i.e. Doom 3).

AMD should have chosen something else to be their marketing platform for AMD64 games, this one is just really pathetic. it belongs in the budget bin.

 

[BFG10K]

If it's not BS then what they would be talking about is "dynamic range" and "bit depth".

However even though the 64bit CPU wouldn't neccisarially be clock for clock faster, it's larger data types would allow it to do the same amount in one pass that would take a 32bit cpu 3-4 passes.

The colour has nothing to do with the CPU because the GPU is doing all of the calculations.