Comments on: 64 bit games on the horizon, but not here yet.

By: Jury

Jury — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 23:14:03 +0000

I just stumbled across this fairly old article, but I’d like to add my perspective.

It’s increasingly common these days to have more than 4GB of RAM. Especially in the circles of tech geeks and hardcore players. On such systems, you can only use all that memory with either 64b system, or a specially tweaked kernel (and that has some downsides).

Of course you can run 32b apps withing 64b system, but that also means additional 32b libraries (not straightforward for a newbie) and sometimes there are even more problems. It may be just my environment, but some of your demos for example are just crashing for me.

Anyway, keep up the good work. I’ve already bought one of your games and I plan more in the future.

By: Jon

Jon — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 09:24:25 +0000

I’ve been running 64-bit Vista for almost two years, and 64-bit Linux (Ubuntu server LTS) for almost a year now. I have had much fewer problems than I expected! The biggest annoyance is really having to type longer pointer values into debugger windows, which I figure is a habit to get into to future-proof myself anyway.
I can whole-heartedly recommend it.

By: Oliver

Oliver — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 09:37:50 +0000

Running a fully 64bit system is no problem at all, and in distros that provide 32bit library packages for 64bit systems, running 32bit applications is no problem either (95% of the time, and this is with x86_64, I have no experience with Intel 64bit systems).

I don’t think it’s really LGP’s responsibility to provide 64bit binaries if the game didn’t originally have 64bit binaries. As long as the 32bit binaries work on my 64bit system, I’m happy.

By: Clean3d

Clean3d — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 05:31:23 +0000

Fascinating article. 64-bit computing still doesn’t feel to me like its “caught on” on the consumer level yet. As an example, I have a 64-bit processor in my machine but am running 32-bit Linux anyway because of the troubles 64-bit libraries cause me.

The only place I think 64-bit computing has made large-scale changes are with Apple’s Macintosh computers. Switching all their processors to 64-bit and creating a coding environment in which programs can run on both old/new machines was something I hope can push the adoption of this “new” tech. I could be wrong, since everything I’m typing is unsubstantiated opinion, but 64-bit seems slightly like a novelty right now.