Quote: "but when will we hit the ceiling? when will we say this is fast enough? whats next 128 bit and 256 bit? come on!!!"
When we end up with photo-realistic graphics, beyond that point it's not really worth improving graphics. Of cause encryption, human-intelligence level AI, ultra realistic physics, and making gaming zones large, and more populated the ever before would prob push processing speeds even faster again.
Of cause at that point we'd probibly be bying "make your own game packages" where you just stand in front of a microphone and discribe what you want to happen, at which point films may well become interactive worlds.
Quote: "plenty of ways around that dual cores are the best one at the moment."
Quote: "you can get Dual Dual-core Opteron 64bit processors at least, that's what i've been told
that would be interesting"
Even duel cores aren't the awnser to double processing power, their's significant overheads to take into account. Duel Core technology was a desperate poly by Intel because AMD's processors are far more efficant. AMD's only really going with it because it looks bad otherwize. But don't get me wrong, there are advantage, but it's all multitasking, having one processor core deal with the graphics and the other, deal with AI, physics etc, but there's margin of improvement over single core processor's when it comes to dedicating all the power to one task isn't as great as many people think it is.
Quote: "they go up to 64GB physical, 4GB adressable, unless you own a Pentium M where it's 4GB physical also."
I beleive that 32-bit tops out at 64Mb "Virtual memory" i.e. paging to hard drive, and 8Gb "Physical Memory" as in ram sticks.
Quote: "Code for 64 bit IS much faster than 32bit. Have you seen a billion plus polygon scene rendering on XSI v5 64bit? If the code isn't optimised for 64bit dual core - you won't see any difference... But if it is - it's brilliant. DBProf is made for creating games that people can play! Make it for a 64-bit system and you've just cancelled out about 95% of your market. Until at least 50% of users have switched to 64bit you will only see games released with 64bit optimised code patches(like Far Cry).
The transition over to 64bit will take years. By the time everyone has settled down with it AMD and Intel will probably announce 128bit."
From what I've read in reviews and technical sheets, 64-bit isn't much faster, it can't just deal with much larger variables in a single go. For things like D=20, it's no faster at all, but when it comes to dealing with the size of variable needed to deal with 128Gb of RAM (physical sticks) or 16 Terrabytes of Virtual RAM (Paging to HDD) then it's definately better, the other advantage is that it is faster with dealing with ram because it can write larger blocks in a single go.
I might be wrong, but that's my understanding.
As for us just getting into 64-bit when they announce 128-bit, unlikely. When we left 16-bit technology it was because RAM size was getting to a point where 16-bit could no longer deal with it. Now 1.5 Gb RAM isn't far fetched, and 4Gb of RAM isn't unknown, manufactures want to make money so 64-bit is required to streach RAM into bigger and bigger sizes. With RAM of 128Gb now a distinct possibility, we have a way to go from 1.5Gb as standard and 4Gb considered high proformance. It's been 10 years since Windows 95 came into existance, and we will probibly have at least 10 years more before technology gets to the point where 128 is required.
Quote: "What I meant is that if the 32bit program is running it can only deal with 32bit data itself. A 32bit program cannot use 64bit dll's because that data types are different, you will have
32bit | 64bit
----------------
int32 | int64
float32| float64
or if it is running under Wow64, then the 64bit dll's would be treated as 32bit anyway.
Edit
or you may be talking about something that I mentioned before, where you have a small 'stub' program which probes the architecture type, and then extracts either the 32bit or 64bit of an app (but this would mean exe's would double in size as they have to carry both versions of the exe and two copies of each dll)."
To begin with 32-bit can be ported to 64-bit code, but because it's basically still 32-bit code in a 64-bit wrapper you can still over the 32-bit DLL for 32-bit systems. That's all the people who produced FAR CRY 64-bit did, it's only now that they are making 64-bit content rather then just making sure it runs on a 64-bit enviroment by wrapping it in a 64-bit wrapper.
Run before you can walk, always raise the stakes higher, always keep moving, because you never know who's catching up.
