64-bit clients

Tors

That is all they said, but this single little line is the most interesting thing in the entire "year ahead" article.

Am very excited, and cant wait for feb to try the new client out.

JD2013

I'm not an overly techie person.

Can you explain what a 64 bit client would change?

r.jan_emailb16_ESO

JD2013 wrote: »

I'm not an overly techie person.

Can you explain what a 64 bit client would change?

Not entirely sure, but it would make better use of your RAM and a multi-core CPU compared to a 32bit one.

Leandor

r.jan_emailb16_ESO wrote: »

JD2013 wrote: »

I'm not an overly techie person.

Can you explain what a 64 bit client would change?

Not entirely sure, but it would make better use of your RAM and a multi-core CPU compared to a 32bit one.

It means that the 32gb of ram I have in my machine will finally be of some use for the memory leaks they aren't able to fix.

altemriel

JD2013 wrote: »

I'm not an overly techie person.

Can you explain what a 64 bit client would change?

32 bit client (current one) can use only 2 GB (or 4 I am not sure now) of RAM. So if you have 8GB or 16GB on your computer, a 32 bit client uses only a very little portion of it now. 64 bit client will increase it, so the game will go faster and smoother.

gw2only1b14_ESO

Leandor wrote: »

r.jan_emailb16_ESO wrote: »

JD2013 wrote: »

I'm not an overly techie person.

Can you explain what a 64 bit client would change?

Not entirely sure, but it would make better use of your RAM and a multi-core CPU compared to a 32bit one.

It means that the 32gb of ram I have in my machine will finally be of some use for the memory leaks they aren't able to fix.

Yep and possible save us from the latency and lag issues in the PVE zones and In PVP

JD2013

altemriel wrote: »

JD2013 wrote: »

I'm not an overly techie person.

Can you explain what a 64 bit client would change?

32 bit client (current one) can use only 2 GB (or 4 I am not sure now) of RAM. So if you have 8GB or 16GB on your computer, a 32 bit client uses only a very little portion of it now. 64 bit client will increase it, so the game will go faster and smoother.

Aha now I get it. I never knew the current client used so little of it.

Thank you!

daemonios

I'd be more excited about dx12 support in the game engine, as that's where the performance would see a great boost.

Other than throwing more RAM at the game, I don't see what 64-bit could do to improve performance, unless they do some code cleanup at the same time.

And no, I don't think 64-bit support magically makes the code more multi-core/multi-thread friendly. That could be achieved with 32-bit code. Those are different issues.

That said, kudos to the dev team for making the jump to 64-bit, and I cautiously await the results

KhajitFurTrader

daemonios wrote: »

I'd be more excited about dx12 support in the game engine, as that's where the performance would see a great boost.

Other than throwing more RAM at the game, I don't see what 64-bit could do to improve performance, unless they do some code cleanup at the same time.

And no, I don't think 64-bit support magically makes the code more multi-core/multi-thread friendly. That could be achieved with 32-bit code. Those are different issues.

That said, kudos to the dev team for making the jump to 64-bit, and I cautiously await the results

I concur. Kudos to them.

A 64-bit memory model will virtually eliminate exceptions ("crashes") raised by memory management gone awry. Better multi-threading behavior would have to be coded, it doesn't appear automagically.

I expect a huge improvement in performance with the new OpenGL 4.1 rendering engine, when compared to its predecessor, but Direct3D 12 support isn't on the map yet. Again, D3D 12 would profit most from dedicated multi-threaded coding, but a slight effect might also be seen with the promised reduction of API overhead.

Nestor

r.jan_emailb16_ESO wrote: »

JD2013 wrote: »

I'm not an overly techie person.

Can you explain what a 64 bit client would change?

Not entirely sure, but it would make better use of your RAM and a multi-core CPU compared to a 32bit one.

Being 64 bit does not mean multicore. It can mean multicore is done better, if the game is coded that way.

Gaiden'Densetsu

It will be like trading in your old Chevy Caprice for a brand new Mercedes, just all around better performance and no sudden breakdowns. Can't wait!!!

Tors

The game only makes use of a single processor, its not multi-threaded, but a 64bit client would allow the use of all your ram.

In itself this wont make things faster, but it will cover up some bad coding, so where the game slowed down due to memory leaks this will not be so apparent.

A 32 bit client can only use 4 gb of memory, a 64 bit client can use all you have.

On top of that it will allow your video cards to work better and make use of all their memory. After all, many people have more than 4gb on their video cards. While the GPU does use that memory, there is less need for an interpreter between it and the OS, so faster retrieval from that memory.


So a precis would be, the 64 bit client would hide some of the issues we are seeing in the client now, it wont fix them, but they shouldn't be so apparent.

Miszou

I'm not seeing the benefit to 64-bit at all...

My fairly modest system has 8GB RAM, i5 CPU, SSD and a Radeon 290X and it runs for days without leaking memory or slowing down at all. Load times are minimal and the game *never* glitches (as older games did when trying to swap memory to/from disk) or crashes.


Sure, it would be "nice" to have a 64-bit client, but as far as performance increases go, there really isn't much to gain imho.

Kwivur

Leandor wrote: »

r.jan_emailb16_ESO wrote: »

JD2013 wrote: »

I'm not an overly techie person.

Can you explain what a 64 bit client would change?

Not entirely sure, but it would make better use of your RAM and a multi-core CPU compared to a 32bit one.

It means that the 32gb of ram I have in my machine will finally be of some use for the memory leaks they aren't able to fix.

Exactly!! I can't wait to use all 32gigs of my ram, overclocked processor and overclock graphics cards. Finally!! Some results!!

Wily_Wizard

They actually said a bit more that sounds promising for people with stability problems.

"The update will also include a ton of updates and fixes to the core game, including support for 64-bit clients. Stay tuned for more details later this month. "

Asmodean

People seem to forget, it's not all about getting 'more' fps. That's not how it works typically. It provides better threading, and memory capabilities (providing it's coded correctly).

This will mainly provide stability increases, in both systems stability and performance(frame rate dips/spikes).

A stable frame rate is actually more important than a flat increase to max fps.

Voxicity

The game code is 32-bit so I would assume unless they rewrite the code, there won't be too much of a performance increase. Maybe some but nothing crazy

danno8

Asmodean wrote: »

People seem to forget, it's not all about getting 'more' fps. That's not how it works typically. It provides better threading, and memory capabilities (providing it's coded correctly).

This will mainly provide stability increases, in both systems stability and performance(frame rate dips/spikes).

A stable frame rate is actually more important than a flat increase to max fps.

^^ This is the best explanation so far of what you would expect.

Kwivur wrote: »

Leandor wrote: »

r.jan_emailb16_ESO wrote: »

JD2013 wrote: »

I'm not an overly techie person.

Can you explain what a 64 bit client would change?

Not entirely sure, but it would make better use of your RAM and a multi-core CPU compared to a 32bit one.

It means that the 32gb of ram I have in my machine will finally be of some use for the memory leaks they aren't able to fix.

Exactly!! I can't wait to use all 32gigs of my ram, overclocked processor and overclock graphics cards. Finally!! Some results!!

There is no way the game will use all of your 32 GB of RAM. Remember other people with less RAM will also be using the 64-bit client, so ZoS will code the game to use a little bit more than 32-bit ESO (and they will clarify that with a new minimum spec for the 64-bit client), or they will make no changes at all and the game will still hover around the 2GB mark like it does right now, BUT there is less likely to be issues of hard drive swapping or out of memory issues.

Like @Asmodean says, it's mainly better stability.

Asmodean

Vox wrote: »

The game code is 32-bit so I would assume unless they reworked the code in places, there won't be too much of a performance increase. Maybe some but nothing crazy

FYI: you can't 'rework' a 32-bit project into a 64-bit one. It needs to be forked and done completely separately. It's also no small task.

I'm only mentioning in case people get the wrong idea reading above.

edit: also - I'd imagine they've had the bones of the work done already, from the console releases.

KhajitFurTrader

Kwivur wrote: »

Exactly!! I can't wait to use all 32gigs of my ram, overclocked processor and overclock graphics cards. Finally!! Some results!!

Ah, sorry, but a 64-bit process will never make use of all physical memory available. If it would, this would mean a serious hit to system performance due to memory thrashing, i.e. the system would grind to a halt while swapping virtual memory pages in and out between RAM and mass storage. After all, the operating system itself, background daemons/services, and all other running processes (64-bit also) take up their portion of RAM, too. It would indeed be very bad form for a single process to malloc() more virtual memory than it actually needs at any given time.

Additionally, all modern operating systems use unallocated ("free") memory space dynamically for buffering disk I/O, as RAM still has way faster access times than even the fastest SSD available. Depriving the OS of this buffer would mean slower I/O, in addition to increased swapping.

So, we (hopefully) won't see an ESO 64-bit client binary being a memory hog. I have never seen the 64-bit WoW client take up more than 2.5 - 3.5 GB of user space (i.e. heap memory), even after hours of play. Since ESO has a higher polycount and texture resolutions, I would expect this number to be higher, but not so high that it would risk a system performance impact due to the aforementioned effects.

smacx250

A common tradeoff in software design is memory footprint vs performance. For example, there are many algorithms that can be done much more quickly if look up tables are pre-computed - but that uses more memory. Also, keeping data around that is not currently needed, but might be needed soon, can greatly speed things up - particularly if those need to otherwise be fetched from disk, or even the network. But if you have to purge that data because you need the memory for other data, than it won't be available "soon". I believe that the client is currently in the situation of being optimized to reduce the memory footprint, because it is "close" to the 32-bit app limit, and therefore "close" to not working. Moving to a 64-bit app will, in many cases, relax this memory constraint and allow for more performant implementations. At least in theory...

Cinbri

I hope 64-bit will be implemented in to PTS too, not just live.

KhajitFurTrader

smacx250 wrote: »

A common tradeoff in software design is memory footprint vs performance. For example, there are many algorithms that can be done much more quickly if look up tables are pre-computed - but that uses more memory. Also, keeping data around that is not currently needed, but might be needed soon, can greatly speed things up - particularly if those need to otherwise be fetched from disk, or even the network. But if you have to purge that data because you need the memory for other data, than it won't be available "soon". I believe that the client is currently in the situation of being optimized to reduce the memory footprint, because it is "close" to the 32-bit app limit, and therefore "close" to not working. Moving to a 64-bit app will, in many cases, relax this memory constraint and allow for more performant implementations. At least in theory...

I'd guesstimate that they may relax the (LRU) freeing of unused assets like textures a bit, at least on machines were free RAM > 4 GB. But even a 64-bit client can't predict what textures it will need to get from the HDD in the next server heartbeat. So, caching over all tiers may be improving. What's important to remember is that an MMO client still has to wait for the server in order to know what mobile and/or dynamic objects it should display in the first place. If the server response is slow due to performance or network bottlenecks (as is the case in Cyrodiil) the client still can't make up its own world completely on its own...

Voxicity

Asmodean wrote: »

Vox wrote: »

The game code is 32-bit so I would assume unless they reworked the code in places, there won't be too much of a performance increase. Maybe some but nothing crazy

FYI: you can't 'rework' a 32-bit project into a 64-bit one. It needs to be forked and done completely separately. It's also no small task.

I'm only mentioning in case people get the wrong idea reading above.

edit: also - I'd imagine they've had the bones of the work done already, from the console releases.

Yeah my bad, wrong word choice lol, thank you

Tors

KhajitFurTrader wrote: »

What's important to remember is that an MMO client still has to wait for the server in order to know what mobile and/or dynamic objects it should display in the first place. If the server response is slow due to performance or network bottlenecks (as is the case in Cyrodiil) the client still can't make up its own world completely on its own...

Exactly, what a user can expect from this is just an improvement in stability, possible less of a FPS loss in combat.

Users commonly use the Ping rate to quantify the server performance, this figure will not be affected by any change of client from 32 to 64bit. UNLESS the client is so bad that multiple clients connecting to ESO causes some kind of DDOS affect.


Anyway, this is all guestimation, we have no idea if the new client will even be real 64 bit or some kind of hashed up pseudo 64bit