Dice says in 2013 Frostbite 2 games will require 64bit OS

[Nintendesert]

Are the next gen consoles going 64bit? (I don't know) If not, then you aren't leaving anyone in the dust, because they are still the lowest common denominator and games will still be ports.

The PS4 sure is. So that's good for the PC world.

 

[BrightCandle]

Are the next gen consoles going 64bit? (I don't know) If not, then you aren't leaving anyone in the dust, because they are still the lowest common denominator and games will still be ports.

They must be, both of them are using greater than 4GB of RAM. It would be pretty daft to produce a console with 8GB and only have a game take up 2GB or 4GB maximum and have the rest left over for the OS. The OS would have to be pretty rubbish to need that much RAM when at that moment its not even being shown. I would say its certain they will be 64 bit, the stupidity involved in any other choice is incomprehensible.

 

[Stringjam]

Are the next gen consoles going 64bit? (I don't know) If not, then you aren't leaving anyone in the dust, because they are still the lowest common denominator and games will still be ports.

Consoles have been 64-bit since the Playstation2 and N64 (or if anybody remembers the Atari Jaguar, I believe that was the first 64-bit console).

 

[Wreckem]

"64bit" has existed since '60s/'70s.

But 64bit doesn't always mean the same thing. I believe what we are refering in this thread is 64bit instruction sets. PS3 and the Xbox 360 are "64bit", but only use 32bit instruction sets. Vista/7/8 and Intel and AMD processors allow for 64bit instruction, PS4 and most likely the next Xbox will as well. The question remains if everyone will develop in 64bit or will some 32bit games come out early on. They will have to eventually develop in 64bit to extract all the power the next consoles have.

The bleeding edge games appear to be 64bit only starting in the second half of this year/early next. This is a good thing.

 

[blackened23]

The key is whether the operating systems in question are 64 bit, and yes they will be to access greater than 4GB of RAM. This wasn't the case on prior consoles.

 

[Cerb]

"64bit" has existed since '60s/'70s.

But 64bit doesn't always mean the same thing.

It means the width of registers that store addresses (for RISC, the GPRs), and the width of the address data types supported. Due the way programming evolved with hardware, those addresses are also either general int registers, too, or the same size as the general int registers. The Cell and Xenon are 64-bit. Before that, the PS2, and N64, were also 64-bit. They all support address data types in hardware of 64 bits wide, and all have 64-bit wide GPRs.

Marketeers like to make numbers bigger, but outside of that, the above is what N-bit entails.

Vista/7/8 and Intel and AMD processors allow for 64bit instruction

Nope. x86 instructions can go up past 15 bytes (I don't recall what the longest anyone today might actually use would be). They are as variable as they used to be, but instructions using the full register widths, and/or the added GPRs, typically add at least 1 byte for that purpose (code that needs not 64-bit data types, nor many registers, will be almost as small as if compiled for IA32--only many of the pointers, and instructions working on them, will need to be bigger).

Also, XP 64-bit came out before even Vista .

Most RISC ISAs use instructions that are 32 bits wide, regardless of register or address space size. Keeping aligned to bytes, and powers of 2, greatly simplifies things, at the cost of some memory bandwidth, offers plenty of room for immediates (5-6 bits will cover it most of the time), and allows for flexible instructions, as opposed to having more instructions doing the same kind of work.

The bleeding edge games appear to be 64bit only starting in the second half of this year/early next. This is a good thing.

They should profile both, and use whichever works best. Hand-optimized code paths they can mix and match with (it's much trickier for the compiler to do it, though it sometimes works well). Of course, any game with rich world detail will pretty much necessitate 64-bit throughout, so it would mostly be flags to try to use the stack over added registers, on occasion, to save instruction size, but still operate in one of the 64-bit modes.