32 / 64 bit support

Well, Im playing for 1-2 years with 3gb of ram and its really enough. Many people said that "you SHOULD have this and that or you will have slow PC" but... that doesnt work for me for now Decent card for 400 zł (130 $), cheap procesor, 3 gb of ram and I can play everything on max.

@Neutrino, if you say so... Now I have a reason for change to 64 bits ;p And, when will be chance to upgrade from retail kickstarter to beta/alpha? I want to throw money at you, but I need something to buy

Friendly advice, don't install Linux if you can't be arsed to install Win7 64bit. But yeah, there's pretty much no reason not to run a 64bit OS now, unless you have technical reasons for it.

Can someone help me our with the technical side of this?

I understand that a 32bit operating system cannot access all of 4Gb of Ram and therefore is wasting some of it.

Thus 64bit OS can break through the (roughly) 4Gb barrier to access up to (If my math stands up) 1000 Billion Gb.

However is it really necessary to have a 64bit version of applications running on these OS's?

ie Is there an advantage to PA being able to access > 4Gb of RAM all to itself?

Note: I accept that I may have got any number of these assumptions wrong

With a design goal of a unit cap at 1 million units, sure there is.

So in 32-bit windows the real limit is closer to 3GB due to address space pollution and that is only available in extreme cases. SupCom for example ran out of address space in a big game.

So yes if we want to have big games we need more than 4GB of ram accessible.

Fair enough. Good answer.

Thanks

see here also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64

also, upgrading your ram is currently one of the cheapest ways to increase your performance (at least if your board still has room for it)

Cheapest yes. But.... performance/price I would go with an SSD. You can pick up (in AU anyways) a 120GB for around $90AUD (cheaper again State side) and if used as a OS/Boot/Game drive will load everything pretty darn fast. Even on older systems.

I used to recommend Ram over anything, but that was windows xp/vista... things changed I guess.

Marco

sure, for overall performance a faster drive never hurts, but in single session situations like RTS games, the "loading from disk" part isn't really a central aspect.

In the end it always depends a bit on where your system is currently the weakest, there you get the most out of you money in relative gain.

for the equivalent of $90AUD, I could get here around 16GB of RAM.

also, the question drive vs. ram depends a bit on how well the memory management of the specific game is done.

Hmm no, my latest upgrade from 8 to 16 GB really didn't do anything apart from freeing up space on my SSD, since my system can now run without any virtual memory at all.
But apart from that it isn't really faster.
Not enough RAM kills performance, but too much RAM just sits there and idles.
I can't wait to load a RAM-disc with PA, though.

Careful with this. You can actually reduce your system performance by entirely removing the allocated page file, even if you KNOW you have more than enough RAM to cover all your needs. This is because some programs (read: micro$uck windows utilities) will write to page files even if there is free RAM, and not having allocated space for it makes them grumpy.

^This

But a RAMDISK could help here.

My thinking is that such programs SHOULD just use the ram that available.
Maybe some programs are stupid and get grumpy, but I am runnning the system like this for a few weeks now and so far the only instance of grumpy-ness I have seen occured after provoking it by running a 20GB-test on prime95 x64. That pretty much killed the system, processes dieing all over the place xD
Also I cant imagine "normal" software doing something like "I request that these bytes I am holding here should be put into the page file, please" That's a pretty low level decision that should be made by the OS. Well, some ms-tools might do it, thinking that they are part of the OS xD

In normal usage I've been around 8 to 10 GB used and it has been working like a charm so far. If it costs performance it is not noticeable, if it makes windows utilities grumpy I must have missed them.
The additional space on the SSD is so far the only change I have noticed.
Might change when I start to load PA into a Ramdisk and play it, though ^^

EDIT:
Some quick google on the topic tells me things like
"You dont want to run a virtual machine without a pagefile on the host" -> I am doing this nearly daily, it works.
"defrag utilities will fail" -> I'd never defrag my ssd anyway
"superfetch suffers" -> again the ssd does not need this

Some other article: http://www.tweakhound.com/2011/10/10/th ... thout-one/ basically says: yeah makes no statistically significant difference if you have enough ram.

No argument there. Kind of like ALL programs should allow me to choose where to install them, but every once in a while I run across something that blindly installs into C:\Program Files on my SSD, and there's no way to change it short of manually editing the registry, which gives me a headache.

-Stretch

Junction paths ftw

*grumbles about the Users folder*

I feel with you.

@stretchyalien:
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshel ... llext.html

God yes, don't even get me started on the Users folder. That thing is a monstrosity. I understand what they were trying to do and why they did it, but I would really just rather that programs wrote their saves into their own install folder.

Somewhere I read about a registry edit that you could make that would allow you to move the users folder off of C. Supposedly theres also some obscure switch you can set during initial install of the OS.

Another one that recently got me was when I upgraded my RAM from 8 to 24 GB. Suddenly C: was full, for no apparent reason. That's because windows writes a hidden file called hiberfil.sys ON ROOT that is the same size of your RAM, so that it knows it has enough disk space to hibernate. I don't know about you, but I don't hibernate my tower. You can remove the file by turning off the system's hibernate option, but that one absolutely cannot be moved in any way - it MUST be on C:\ if it exists. Theres an amusing thread about it over on the MS support site with stories of what happened to people who tried various registry wizardry to move it to another drive.

-Stretch

yeah I removed the hibernate-file together with the page-file from my ssd.
Feels cool to have 30GB free on it again, just by disabling unused features.