Devs time for a 64BIT version???

[Derbysieger 11]

Fact is most people still don't run a Dx10 capable OS! Which makes arma3's dx10 requirement so interesting.

Of course in one years time the vast majority will be running W7 or the equivalent.

-k

Most people I know who are gamers run Win 7 and some run Vista. The last one changed from XP to Win 7 one year ago.

[megagoth1702 251]

As soon as they make the game 64bit - I want all the damn LODs of trees etc. loaded into my memory instead of having to wait for my HDD to put them into the game every single time I zoom in&out... This is horrible.

[ModeZt 0]

oh shiiiiii...

not this again.

ArmA2 is 64-bit aware since 1.07. It and can use all the memory on 64-bit operating systems.

[AnimalMother92 10]

oh shiiiiii...

not this again.

ArmA2 is 64-bit aware since 1.07. It and can use all the memory on 64-bit operating systems.

Hmm? I have 8gbs of RAM and Arma has never used anywhere near to that.

[sickboy 13]

Not 64-bit aware, but LAA (large-address-aware) :)

http://www.monash.edu.au/policy/gp-laa.htm

That means up to 4 GB on a 64-bit OS.

Edited May 25, 2011 by Sickboy

[killakaze 10]

Anyone with black screens this might help.

I used to run out of memory all the time and also get black screens that eventually recover or needed a flush to recover, i always had the impression black screen and running out of memory were related. somehow the ram issue stopped acouple months ago cant remmeber what fixed that but i was still get black screens until One day i alt tabbed out of a black screen and noticed a little windows msg pop up over the clock in the toolbar for 2 seconds saying "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered" i had never noticed the error before, its very easy to miss, i alt tabbed back in to arma 2 and it was working but abit more stutter until my system had been rebooted. realising the card was having some kind of trouble i started mucking around with evga precision overclocking my gpu & noticed as soon as i tried upping shader clocks and running arma id get "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered" i returned the setting back to default in evga precision then reduced shaders by a notch or two on the slider which is less than 20hz or whatever and i havnt had a black screen since, i can overclock memory core and the cpu core on the card without issue so now i run it overclocked with shader slightly under default and im getting better perfomance than ever without issue.

q9550 @ 3.7ghz, sparkle 285gtx 2gb, 8gb ram, ssd drive

[svo 10]

Interesting Killakaze. I don't overclock usually, but am very aware of the display driver problem. I'll give it a go right now.

[kridian 33]

..and noticed a little windows msg pop up over the clock in the toolbar for 2 seconds saying "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered"

I remember the days in ArmA 1 when I'd see this constantly with my 8800GTX, then I switched to an ATI/AMD vid card and have not seen it since.

I might go back to NVidia... one day.

[killakaze 10]

How did you go with it SVO?

Kridian yeah i orginally had dual core and a 8800gts when i first got arma and i was getting black screens and receiving constantly it was unbearable

Btw when the drivers recover from not responding i remmeber reading something about the 3d mode of the card cannot run properly or something and the gpu reverts to some basic 2d mode or something whatever it was is why you need to reboot after a driver stops responding to get back to the right performance.

[=wfl= sgt bilko 10]

According to Steam HW survey (from April 2011):

- About 50% of the windows crowd are running a 64-bit OS (XP/Vista/W7)

- About 56% are running a gfx card with DX10 support on a matching OS

- And about 5.6% with DX11 support on a matching OS

Hard to tell what it'll be in a year from now.

[vfn4i83 0]

According to Steam HW survey (from April 2011):

- About 50% of the windows crowd are running a 64-bit OS (XP/Vista/W7)

- About 56% are running a gfx card with DX10 support on a matching OS

- And about 5.6% with DX11 support on a matching OS

Hard to tell what it'll be in a year from now.

Had another, but all practically the same. Either way, this one is broader than STEAM.

http://unity3d.com/webplayer/hardware-stats

[Brainbug 10]

Don't forget that the Steam user base is not necessarily the same as the Arma user base, because a lot of people that use Steam are just playing Counterstrike or various casual games or generally speaking games that don't require that much horsepower.

On the other hand, do you really want to play Arma2 on a Geforce 7000 series or a Radeon X1000 series (you may even think 7950GX2 or X1950XTX here)? I think noone wants, so I assume the vast majority of the current Arma2 userbase already has at least DX10 hardware (even if they are still running XP). And as you said, it's still a year to go.

[Steakslim 1]

Man that brought me back. My first video card I ever bought was a 7950gt.

[CameronMcDonald 146]

I remember the days in ArmA 1 when I'd see this constantly with my 8800GTX, then I switched to an ATI/AMD vid card and have not seen it since.

I might go back to NVidia... one day.

The initial 8800 series card drivers were fucking horrible. I persisted and they eventually solved it, after much heartache.

[seelix 10]

Will the 64Bit discussion start again some day ?

[hellfire257 3]

As far as I'm concerned, it is settled.

[Dwarden 1124]

i see no point it was explained multiple times,

that in many cases the 64bit version will increase memory usage (double) w/o any performance gain

the product is LAA aware, so it may (if needed) directly address 4GB of memory plus also already can use N GB indirectly ...

the native 64bit application is thus not on schedule of this year

[galzohar 31]

If file cache is separate from the address space so practically the game can use more than 4GB of ram (especially for stuff that are constantly being streamed from the hard drive), why do people with a lot of RAM need to do something silly like a ramdisk to make the game run smoothly?

Is there no way to just make it not have to constantly re-read stuff from the hard drive? And if there is no way, wouldn't going for 64-bit make it possible one way or another?

Currently people go and buy insane amounts of RAM to make ramdisks to make the game run smoothly, so I think they wouldn't mind running a 64-bit version that would take twice the memory, considering they already load many GBs of game files into their ram with their ramdisk software.

I really don't care if the game has a 64-bit version or not, but the constant FPS drops due to loading stuff from the hard drive, regardless of available RAM, is really annoying. Even the best machines seem to suffer from this, since even pricey SSDs aren't fast enough to keep up...

[sickboy 13]

The bottleneck may lay elsewhere. Stutters don't have to be only caused by reading stuff from the harddrive, even though it is a bottleneck when slow harddrives are concerned.

Implementation might also be an issue.

Is there evidence that shows on the same system, that a fast SSD still causes stutters while RAMDRIVE does not?

In regards to Stutter Prevention by Caching, effectively it doesn't seem to matter much if you'd run a 64-bit version with increased file-cache, or cache yourself through RAMDRIVE.

While changing the engine to support 64-bit might require a lot of work, while the size of users who have more than 12 GB ram (you need even more to cache it all) is probably rather small still too.

An issue of the current cache implementation might be that it cannot predict everything that is going to be needed in the cache throughout the mission due to the dynamic nature of many (custom) missions.

Some of the missions spawn all the objects that could be randomly spawned later, caching it in the process and thus reduce / remove stutters when dynamically spawning objects throughout the mission, unless the cache has been overwritten already with more important data.

Edited August 23, 2011 by Sickboy

[MavericK96 0]

Honestly though, I don't see why it can't cache the entire island, whichever one you are playing anyway. I mean the entire island data files are what, less than 1 GB? Plus structures and stuff it can get up there but if it has access to at least 4 GB of RAM it should not be an issue.

Also, after switching to an SSD I've seen virtually zero stutter, so I think the main issue there was definitely HDD I/O swapping.

After I got another 6 GB of RAM I tried using a RAMDisk again, putting basically all of the standard OA files on it. I actually got worse stuttering than with the SSD for some reason. I haven't really played around with it enough to know why, but it definitely was not an improvement.

Edited August 23, 2011 by MavericK96

[Vipera 10]

MavericK96, how much memory do you use for Ramdisk? You need enough RAM for ARMA2 and Windows to see improovements while using Ramdisk. For example, if you have 12Gb memory and you leave 3Gb for RAM and rest 9Gb for Ramdisk you will get bad performance than if you make 5Gb for Ram and 7Gb for Ramdisk.

[MavericK96 0]

I believe I tried 4 GB RAMDisk first and then 6 GB. Both times I should have had plenty of RAM left over.

[sickboy 13]

So unlike Galzohar claimed, buying an SSD seems a better choice than adding 16 or more GB of ram into your system and work with ramdrives, or a 64-bit game edition.

SSD is getting more and more common, and standard memory sizes are slowly growing as well, while 64-bit OS are also spreading.

Better use storage devices for storage and memory for actual memory purposes :P

Seems to make sense now that harddrive performance is moving forward a lot faster due to SSD, than with the magnetic drives we were stuck with for years.

Edited August 24, 2011 by Sickboy

[gossamersolid 155]

SSDs are still expensive as shite to what they hold.

When SSDs get to holding 1TB for what a standard old drive does, then I'll get one. Until then, I'd rather spend my money on stuff like a processor/mobo.

[Dwarden 1124]

you all forget the critical aspect of RAMdrive I/O tanking CPU ...

SSD is more feasible solution (be it SATA or PCIe)

also the content needed for island is way more than 1GB :)