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Thanks To Vulkan, We Should Be Seeing More 64-bit Linux Games

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  • #11
    12 years after my 1st Athlon 64 I still cannot play games in 64 bits, that's so incredible!
    May Vulkan change this

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    • #12
      Incorrect, many games select the correct binary on the fly (wrapper script). Others like both Metro Redux are 64 bit only. Talos Principle shows a manual selection screen. But there are of course lots of 32 bit only games - most of em use eON. Basically 32 bit can be fast too, it depends a bit how complex the game is. If it needs lots of math then 64 bit is usually faster.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by axfelix View Post
        Huh, I'm surprised (and pleased) the difference is that significant. Are most game development environments really not at a point where they can just add a 64bits flag to the compiler and produce a 64-bit build on x86? I'm confused that this is novel
        Even under same arch, x86_64 the size of long is different between Windows & Linux. As 64bit supports 32bit (in theory anyway with compat libraries) there's a tendency to decide to simplify on LCD to apparently maximise the market.

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        • #14
          Originally posted by Passso View Post
          12 years after my 1st Athlon 64 I still cannot play games in 64 bits, that's so incredible!
          May Vulkan change this
          You mean commercial games, FOSS stuff has been ported years ago.

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          • #15
            Originally posted by rob11311 View Post
            You mean commercial games, FOSS stuff has been ported years ago.
            Of course I am talking about commercial games, not about XBill
            ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBill )

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            • #16
              Could someone say which of these newer AAA games are still 32bit for Linux?

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              • #17
                Personally, I don't really see how Vulkan is really going to change anything. There was hardly a good reason for any OpenGL games to be 32 bit. But as pointed out before, maybe if Valve required a 64 bit OS, things would be different.

                I'm getting really sick of seeing 32 bit binaries, and I think Windows (and Intel, to a degree) are largely to blame.

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                • #18
                  Originally posted by schmidtbag View Post
                  Personally, I don't really see how Vulkan is really going to change anything.
                  Because Vulkan is very low level, programming with it probably means using a lot of cases where the code would be different for 32-bit and 64-bit. To minimize costs, not many devs will do both, and as 64-bit is better to make high-end graphics (memory usage etc.), they will do 64-only instead of 32-only.

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                  • #19
                    Anything that causes developers to rebuild & redistribute their game binaries is another opportunity to revisit the 32- vs 64-bit decision.
                    Test signature

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                    • #20
                      @eyedee and bridgman
                      But, doesn't the code need some significant changes just to go from Windows to Linux anyway, regardless of Vulkan? Don't they have to rebuild and redistribute no matter what? I understand that in some cases, code may be optimized for 32 bit, but I don't understand how stepping up to 64 bit would be an issue. Suppose you didn't optimize the code take advantage of the extra registers, compiling for 64 bit is still useful since it would eliminate the need for 32 bit binaries on a 64 bit system, and potentially some overhead CPU or disk overhead. Just to point out though - I am aware that optimizing for both could be a burden and time-inefficient.

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