Steve Ronuken wrote:Khira Kitamatsu wrote:Is it really a minority of players that is holding back the advancement of EVE to a 64bit client? How many people still use Win 98 or XP to play EVE Online? We can't have nice things like tessellation, DX11, or utilize more memory until the minority hold-outs upgrade their gaming systems. My question is...when will CCP realize that the rest of the gaming world has moved onto 21st century tech and they are still working with tech from 2001 and their game engine needs a major upgrade? Will the game continue to be held back by the minority of players that are too cheap to upgrade?
And what benefit do you see from changing Eve from 32 bit to 64 bit?
It's not like Eve is using anywhere near the 32 bit limits. Sub 1GB atm.
you don't play eve do you? most if not ALL fleet battles will cap EVE at the 2GB limit and often crash it due to memory overflows.
After doing some tests of memory, where is it bound and rushing to death into some small fleet battles and skirmishes I have gotten some conclusions:
1. Eve Do could benefit if optimized for 64 bitscurrently it uses very easily over 1.3 gb of ram on normal flight, up to 1.5 on small skirmishes and gobs all the 2GB of 32 bit memory it can handle on fleet battles. if optimized it could probably reduce crashes and increase performance.
Cache: a change to 64 bits would allow the client to precache a LOT more of data, ignoring textures since those are handled in the GPU, you could arguably keep preloaded all the adjacent systems (would add some overhead on the server as well which could be handled by multithreading on the backend for keeping up to date precached data).
The benefit of this would be that heavily loaded systems could be loaded way faster into the computer and in the technical side it could allow things like for example, looking out the window and seeing who is outside, How? simple by keeping the out of station grid loaded on memory to fetch data from it.
2. CPU, EVE is CPU bound currentlygiven its single core nature, big fleet battles see frames dropping from 250+ fps to 8 fps at max graphics, with the CPU at 100% usage, this happens around 300+ ppl shooting at each other.
multithreading could increase this a lot as stated by CCP in some other topic, could keep audio, gpu feeding, physics, network, UI, on separate threads increasing performance a lot.
Tidi is due to the fact the server is still single threading if the servers were able to multithread each node, we could get a performance gain on the 50% per core (more or less... depends on overhead just a rough estimate).
separating physics on amount of ships per core, networking, and stat calculation, but it would need VERY fast RAM to fetch the data shared among cores.
3. GPU: EVE is poorly optimized for GPU tasks currentlyI m not sure but it seems like it loads the texture for ships more than once, given they are pretty low resolution its strange they use so MUCH memory on the GPU, the models are very low Poly, but the shaders and those damned clouds seem to kill any hardware or to have very high hits, however given current GPU capacity, this is in the meantime something we can ignore.
if it was up to me which is not... my technical priority to CCP would be to multithread the server, then the client and then 64 bits.
as a note, multithreading can be done without forcing players to change hardware so this is definitely the best way to go right now.
Tippia is half right, 64 bits is not mandatory right now but it could improve things quite a bit.