32 bit vs 64 bit and dx10 vs dx 11 limitations

[Geek113377]

i'm upgrading to 64 bit as soon as the disk arrives, but my current computer is dx 9 or 10 (idk which). i'll be getting a dx11 computer in the next few years

 

[EmpireOfCats]

I'm a sophomore CS major and memory management hasn't even been mentioned, except in explaining why destructors are needed when pointers are used.

Maybe they assume that people will finally switch to languages with garbage collection like they should be doing unless they are programming something really, really exotic. Which Civ is not. There is no excuse for memory leaks in a turn-based computer game.

What disappoints me is that there is still no word about an OS X version (unless I missed it). Mac are now ten percent of desktop market share and rising, and here Firaxis is still pretending it is 1990.

 

[civ_king]

http://www.golem.de/1006/75897.html
they mention Mac, (article is in German)

The Mac version better be super multicored (GCD FTW!)

 

[Mark Havel]

As far as I know, there is a Mac version for Civ IV. If it is not Firaxis, which seems to be a rather small studio, someone like Aspyr will port the game to Mac.

If Civ V is specifically designed for 64-bit (in other words, requiring more than 2GB of RAM) it will be suicide for Firaxis. That will cut out a huge percentage of their customers. On the other hand, if the game is 64-bit capable but does not require all that much RAM there will be little benefit to it.

This is the dilemma of 64-bit. To get the greatest benefit out of it you need to find a way to use all that RAM. You also don't want to leave money on the table.

Well, an AMD64 CPU (aka all Intel and AMD CPU that are 64 bits capable) does not only features enhanced RAM addressing capacities. It also has a few more registers here and there, some specific instructions have been added, so it is actually a bit more than a simple x86 able to address more than 4 GB of RAM. Therefore, optimising a version of Civ V for these now commodity CPU does make sense, even if the game does not necessarily requires a lot of RAM.
Compiling a program to be x86-64 capable doesn't magically make this program requiring more than 2 GB of memory to run...

 

[EmpireOfCats]

If it is not Firaxis, which seems to be a rather small studio, someone like Aspyr will port the game to Mac.

That's what I'm afraid of. The Aspyr port was such a disaster that I ended buying the PC version instead. Given their silence on the matter, I think this is what it is going to happen.