How will memory usage be handled?

Apologies if my knowledge on the topic is less than adequate. I remember that Skyrim on PC had a problem a while back where the game was barely using any RAM, causing performance problems that were addressed in a patch that increased the RAM the game could allocate.

What are the devs plans for PA? I remember hearing some number thrown around about a plan to use up to 64 cores or something (in a livestream i think) and I've read posts by Neutrino telling everyone to get 64 bit OS for this game.

My question is: will the game be able to call upon more RAM as needed and not have a hardcap, like Skyrim still does? I have 32gb of ram, I hate to see 3/4 of it never used.

The current plan is to support 32bit (for babbies) and 64bit (for manly men).

The vast majority of game labor will be handled by a central server (anyone can host a server, even yourself for single player mode). All the computer specs for playing online is going to be restricted to eye candy.

The real problem with modern games is dealing with multi core CPU design. Most games can not handle more than 1 or 2 CPUs to maximize performance (as often seen in task manager as 25%/50% demand on a 4 core or ~12/25% demand on an 8 core). The dev goal is to handle up to 64 cores for their servers. We do not know if they'll reach their goal, but it will absolutely be as many as possible.

The point of the Engine they're creating is that it's scalable, so in theory the goal is to have it use as many resources as available.

Mike

Indeed, the ability to scale up is a rather unique selling point for the game. Fingers crossed.

Skyrim is a 32 bit executable with an engine mainly written for use on consoles. By their nature 32 bit executables are limited in their memory usage. PA is compiled as 64 bit by default, so memory usage limits won't be an issue for 64bit OS users.

Thanks for explaining that, I had no idea. Great news everyone!

I hope you're not a developer who has never heard of large adress aware. Which was eventually patched into Skyrim without changing it into a 64 bit exe.

Afaik this only extends to 4gb.

I had a larger post explaining the 2GB/~3GB limit on a 32 bit OS vs the 4GB limit on 32 bit exe on a 64 bit OS vs multiple terabytes for 64 bit exe on a 64 bit OS (I believe on Windows 64 it's still "limited" to ~8TB per application). I dropped it down to what I posted as I figured people who were interested would look up the info themselves.

Interesting, never really thought about a 64bit exe vs a 32bit exe on a 64bit OS. Any idea offhand how many games do the same thing? (64bit exe) Only one I can think of is Crysis 1 and Warhead.

HL2 had a 64-bit version for a while but it was horribly broken and HL2 doesn't need that much memory anyway.

UT2004 also had one, which again had missing features with no real benefit due to the relatively low memory footprint I'm pretty sure.

I think these two were mostly because AMD paid them to in order to promote the architecture for gaming.

I bought into this game hoping for

1. Next step in evolution for GUI

• Scaleability

This thread brings up an interesting question... if I have a 32 bit machine, I should definitely be able to play as a client, but how do I host a game (locally 2-3 player max of course)?

Will there be a way to launch a server on a 32 bit system?

We don't have final answers for exactly how well 32 bit systems will run the server, but the only real difference between 64 bit and 32 bit should be the memory limitations (and thus player count / planet size limits). If you have a PC with 2 GB of RAM for some reason the 64 bit and 32 bit servers shouldn't be all that different if at all. Certainly we will have to support servers running on a 32 bit OS as single player will still run as a client / server internally, just with the server running hidden in the background with only your client connect. You might be surprised how many games actually run in this way (like any game that has an online coop option).