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[guessingo]

64 bit means you can use over 4gb of RAM for the game. Does anyone get close to needing that much? This doesnt use graphics. You can store an awful lot of ascii artifacts in far less than 4gb of memory. Does anyones game ever run out of memory?

Is there anything else that 64 bit will do for DF?

[smakemupagus]

Of course.  Generate a medium or large world with over a couple hundred years history.

[FantasticDorf]

The game is already incredibly demanding, and its really a sign of moving with the times since most computers are optimised for 64bit.

Currently with the test build of the 64 bit, its working better than ever before on my low end spec laptop.

[Shonai_Dweller]

I'm guessing this is a troll thread as anyone who actually plays the game knows that DF does a hell of a lot more than 'display a bunch of ascii characters'. But still...

Even in it's current state DF will crash due to the limitations of 32 bit when you generate a large world or try to embark at full size.

And that's right now with the game still decades from completion. When you start generating alternative planes with Gods doing whatever they do, ships and merchants moving around the world, everything else planned, you're going to need a 64 bit DF.

Multithreading too probably at some point, maybe. But 64 bit is a good start.

Something about the 64 bit version has also surprisingly improved performance somewhat when adventuring in large sites (was trying this out for myself on my cheap laptop and it's pretty noticable, although it may just be a lucky side effect of updating the compiler).

[Cruxador]

It's not a graphical ram thing, it's general purpose ram. Graphical RAM is on the graphics card and dedicated to stuff like you're thinking of, but most of your RAM is on the motherboard and is used for the assorted data involved in running your programs and OS and stuff.  As people are saying, it can already be exceeded. With 64 bit, you can now set DF up to gen a big long world and leave it while you go to work, and it will have succeeded when you come home. 64bit is also faster in practice, though that's not technically a property inherent to it.

Shonai, remember that not everyone is as computer literate as you. I'm assuming he knows of RAM solely or primarily from graphics card specs.

[Putnam]

That's really bizarre, since you don't get RAM on its own and video memory is usually only shown in advertisement AFAIK. I don't even know what the video memory of my last three graphics cards were.

[ORCACommander]

That's really bizarre, since you don't get RAM on its own and video memory is usually only shown in advertisement AFAIK. I don't even know what the video memory of my last three graphics cards were.

its usually on the product packaging or depending on the manufacturer incorporated into their model code.

alternatively you can run gpu-z and it will bring up the relevant info.


go down a few threads download my world and open it in a standard df installation. It Will crash on you.

[Linkxsc]

If you dont know your machine specs. On windows machines, winkeu+r
Dxdiag
And thatll show you your ram and card specs.



And yes 64 bit will be very big for us. As i will finally be able to do a 16x16 embark

[Putnam]

will be

try again

[MoonyTheHuman]

will be

try again

43.05 x64-86 edition

[FantasticDorf]

Guess what, its here already. Seems pretty good.

Now Toady can work on other things i guess. He's patched up some issues in the intial test client < 64bit release and it definitely works much better now.

[Yawzheek]

I'm definitely no computer guru, and I'm still a noob programmer (virtual functions in C++ still baffle and amaze me), but if I understand it correctly, 32-bit programs are generally limited to 2 GB of total RAM, whereas 64-bit can utilize up to 4 GB. I don't want to give bad information, so don't take my word as law, but I believe that's one of the major improvements.

[Putnam]

Very bad information. 32-bit can go up to 4 GB and 64-bit up to 4,294,967,296 GB.

[Boltgun]

64-bit can utilize up to 4 GB

You'll no longer crash because your world is too big or that there is too many dwarves to calculate path for. Gimmick of 16x16 embarks aside, having a more stable game is always good.

Also I saw reports from OSx users getting better FPS. I'd like to see some benchmark, or at least some attempts at loading FPS dead forts and see what happens.

[Kumquat]

Most consumer grade PCs are limited to a maximum of 32G physical memory. Servers can go up to 128G.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

However there are other benefits too arising from 64bit architecture, which make 64bit code somewhat faster:
- 8 general purpose registers instead of 4
- SSE floating point instead of x87 FPU
- Faster function calls (More parameters are passed in CPU registers, not in memory)

The drawback is that pointers are twice as large, which makes programs use up more memory in turn.

Technical details aside, generally the side effect of converting to 64bit is 2%-5% speedup, very much dependent on the program however.

Also the game won't be running in "32 bit emulation" mode in your 64bit OS, which helps a tiny bit as well.