Why is this 64bit?

[Siloam]

Please forgive my outdated OS, but it seems like it should be able to run a game that is even more outdated. As it is, I won't be able to play this game, and this makes me sad.

[Crashed]

The game industry generally prefers 64-bit these days, as both the top-tier consoles (PS4 and XBOX One) run on 64-bit x86 platforms. Sticking with 64-bit helps reduce the complexity of the codebase as it means less processors to support.

[Siloam]

Originally posted by Crashed:

The game industry generally prefers 64-bit these days, as both the top-tier consoles (PS4 and XBOX One) run on 64-bit x86 platforms. Sticking with 64-bit helps reduce the complexity of the codebase as it means less processors to support.

Ah, makes sense. Too bad. Thanks for the reply and the info.

[Double Flower]

No Jet Set Radio Future no Buy. Get use to it, SEGA and respect other titles too.

[V I D A L]

No. You should not be forgiven for your outdated OS and the game should not care about supporting 32 bits OS. This is a modern port to modern OS.. step it up dude.

[Kaldaien]

It's sort of unfortunate that games that don't need to be 64-bit are, since it cuts your CPU cache efficiency in half and uses more memory. 64-bit code is ultimately slower, BUT... as developers there are many benefits that come from 64-bit that more than make up for the performance penalty.

The biggest beneift in an open world game has to do with memory fragmentation (or rather, the lack of it when you go 64-bit). Much easier to test your software when you don't have to fear running out of memory due to fragmentation :)

[Crashed]

Originally posted by Kaldaien:

It's sort of unfortunate that games that don't need to be 64-bit are, since it cuts your CPU cache efficiency in half and uses more memory. 64-bit code is ultimately slower, BUT... as developers there are many benefits that come from 64-bit that more than make up for the performance penalty.

The biggest beneift in an open world game has to do with memory fragmentation (or rather, the lack of it when you go 64-bit). Much easier to test your software when you don't have to fear running out of memory due to fragmentation :)

Is it necessarily in half or would it be more like 10-50% depending on what portion is pointers?
Doesn't Visual C++ still use 32-bit for integer types?

[Kaldaien]

Cache lines and associativity are disrupted by the larger address space.

But, you do have a point here... initial x64 chips only used a 48-bit address space in order to try and curtail massive data cache inefficiencies when going from 32- to 64-bit.

Newer generation processors have steadily increased the usable address space (at the cost of cache usefulness) but we're actually still not running chips that use 64-bit pointers :) The registers are 64-bit and by extension our storage of any pointer is 64-bit, but there's a substantial amount of the 64-bit address space that is illegal and will just cause the CPU to generate exceptions.

[Crashed]

Originally posted by Kaldaien:

Cache lines and associativity are disrupted by the larger address space.

But, you do have a point here... initial x64 chips only used a 48-bit address space in order to try and curtail massive data cache inefficiencies when going from 32- to 64-bit.

Newer generation processors have steadily increased the usable address space (at the cost of cache usefulness) but we're actually still not running chips that use 64-bit pointers :) The registers are 64-bit and by extension our storage of any pointer is 64-bit, but there's a substantial amount of the 64-bit address space that is illegal and will just cause the CPU to generate exceptions.

I'm sure when I make the move on my own application from 32 to 64 bit things will blow up spectacularly...

[Styke]

The amazing thing is the game is 30gigs when the Dreamcast used GD-ROM which had a maximum capacity of 1gig, meaning the games where either 15 CDs each or Sega has really, really slipped in some killer back-end for a game that was developed 1998-1999

[Miraglyth]

Originally posted by Styke:

the Dreamcast used GD-ROM which had a maximum capacity of 1gig, meaning the games where either 15 CDs each or

Shenmue is 3 discs plus a "Passport" disc for a gameplay analysis and online extras service.
Shenmue II is 4 discs.

So that's 7 GB maximum to start with, but much of that would be overlapping assets that are needed by multiple discs.

I haven't read into the improvements, but for instance if there was heavily compressed audio on the Dreamcast and the masters were retained, they could have been re-encoded at higher quality which would chew up quite a bit.

As would the English dub for II which was not on the Dreamcast version (and off the top of my head I can't remember if the Japanese dub for the original was either) so that's a simple addition.

[Kaldaien]

Originally posted by Styke:

The amazing thing is the game is 30gigs when the Dreamcast used GD-ROM which had a maximum capacity of 1gig, meaning the games where either 15 CDs each or Sega has really, really slipped in some killer back-end for a game that was developed 1998-1999

It isn't that large, the free space requirement in games is for the installation process (usually uses 2x as much as the final game for digitally downloaded titles). This _is_ a requirement since you can't play the game without installing it, but it's not the final size.

Incidentally, the Steam client typically requires 3x final size free for preloads. If storage capacity is a problem for you, preloading is not advisable because decrypting, then decompressing and finally installing is going to fail midway through.

[Hakuso]

Denuvo requires a 64-Bit Windows OS to run, at least the last time I checked and I doubt they've released a 32-Bit version since, even games that would work on a toaster will require a 64-Bit OS if they use that particular form of third party DRM.

[Kaldaien]

Originally posted by Waldschatten:

Denuvo requires a 64-Bit Windows OS to run, at least the last time I checked and I doubt they've released a 32-Bit version since, even games that would work on a toaster will require a 64-Bit OS if they use that particular form of third party DRM.

No it doesn't. God Eater 2 and Sonic Mania are two examples off the top of my head that are 32-bit.

[Crashed]

Originally posted by Kaldaien:

Originally posted by Waldschatten:

Denuvo requires a 64-Bit Windows OS to run, at least the last time I checked and I doubt they've released a 32-Bit version since, even games that would work on a toaster will require a 64-Bit OS if they use that particular form of third party DRM.

No it doesn't. God Eater 2 and Sonic Mania are two examples off the top of my head that are 32-bit.

Does God Eater 2 have the same random key corruption crashes or are they specific to Mania?
P.S. I saw a video of Sonic Mania running quite well on a P4 toaster.

[Kaldaien]

Originally posted by Crashed:

Originally posted by Kaldaien:

No it doesn't. God Eater 2 and Sonic Mania are two examples off the top of my head that are 32-bit.

Does God Eater 2 have the same random key corruption crashes or are they specific to Mania?
P.S. I saw a video of Sonic Mania running quite well on a P4 toaster.

Sonic Mania should run well on a PDA from 2003 :)

I've never heard of any problems with corrupted keys. It's quite hard to cause such a problem without failing hardware since it's a write-once-read-many file.