Found a new issue with 32-bit operating systems
part 1: http://www.anandtech.com/gadgets/showdoc.aspx?i=3034
part 2: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3044&p=1
Summary is that, any application compiled as 32-bit has a 2 GB limit on virtual size. There's no way for the application to actually give itsemf more RAM to work with, and then the application crashes because it tries to refer to memory outside of its address space. Judging from my 10-second glance at the stack trace, I actually think the memory address pointer overflows and tries to point to locations like 0x00000001.
There is no known workaround for this, other than simply turning down the details in your games to delay hitting the 2 GB virtual size allocation.
I'm starting to experience this in Aion now, which has extremely detailed textures and large numbers of people in a single spot. To cope with it, I turn off all rendering of other player-characters (Shift-F12).
If that's not a reason to finally make the transition to 64-bit compiled applications then I don't know what is. Darn it, I wish that there was a Universal-binary style hack in the Windows SDK that would allow people to pack both 32-bit and 64-bit files into the same executable.
Oh and in semi-related news, I turned WoW on the other day and looked at its graphics compared to Aion. Blizzard was actually extremely smart with their art design because they made it in such a style that never really looks "old" so to speak. In other words, if you begin to render photorealistic pictures, but your computer sucks and introduced jagged lines, bad colors, artifacts, and so forth, your game is simply going to look ugly. But in WoW, the game looks a bit uglier but overall it's still just a cartoon so it's not as obvious.
All right guys I hit my 3 posts for the year, see you next time!
part 2: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3044&p=1
Summary is that, any application compiled as 32-bit has a 2 GB limit on virtual size. There's no way for the application to actually give itsemf more RAM to work with, and then the application crashes because it tries to refer to memory outside of its address space. Judging from my 10-second glance at the stack trace, I actually think the memory address pointer overflows and tries to point to locations like 0x00000001.
There is no known workaround for this, other than simply turning down the details in your games to delay hitting the 2 GB virtual size allocation.
I'm starting to experience this in Aion now, which has extremely detailed textures and large numbers of people in a single spot. To cope with it, I turn off all rendering of other player-characters (Shift-F12).
If that's not a reason to finally make the transition to 64-bit compiled applications then I don't know what is. Darn it, I wish that there was a Universal-binary style hack in the Windows SDK that would allow people to pack both 32-bit and 64-bit files into the same executable.
Oh and in semi-related news, I turned WoW on the other day and looked at its graphics compared to Aion. Blizzard was actually extremely smart with their art design because they made it in such a style that never really looks "old" so to speak. In other words, if you begin to render photorealistic pictures, but your computer sucks and introduced jagged lines, bad colors, artifacts, and so forth, your game is simply going to look ugly. But in WoW, the game looks a bit uglier but overall it's still just a cartoon so it's not as obvious.
All right guys I hit my 3 posts for the year, see you next time!