22.10.2006, 19:25:28
(This post was last modified: 22.10.2006, 19:29:15 by Bobingabout.)
yes, how many PCs sold today are 32 bit, and how many are 64bit?
there are more 64bit CPUs than you realise, intel have for some time been selling 64bit CPUs, and never told anyone it was 64bit. almost all CPUs sold today are 64bit(All AMD chips, and most of the intell chips), and the high end ones are duelcore(i heard there are plans for quadcore). the expected lifetime of a PC is 3 years. if the project takes 3 years to complete, you definitly should write it for 32bit and 64bit and multi-threading. some people might use a 32bit OS on a 64bit machine (this is currently so because people say windows XP 64 is crap), in which case the OS usually treats a 64bit processor as 2 32bit cores. therefore, a program should be tuned for 4 cores. graphics thread? this should be handled by the graphics card, not the CPU. my new computer, which should be built by wednesday has 2 1.2GHz GPUs, with 800MHz FSB and 400MHz RAMDAC, and with an upgrade can have upto 4GPUs, therefore graphics rendering should be expected to be done idealy by the graphics card, and not only purely by the graphics card, but also allow multi-threading graphics.
(i supose that means it is possible to run 2 games simultaniously, and the only bottlenecks would be FSB, RAM and Hard drive, but upgrading from a 400MHz FSB and RAMDAC, with 133Mb/s hard drive to a 1GHz FSB and 800MHz RAMDAC, with 300Mb/s hard drive, you might not notice so much(except for hard drive, because of seek time, unless i run from 2 seperate hard drives), although i expect this won't work in practice...).
there are more 64bit CPUs than you realise, intel have for some time been selling 64bit CPUs, and never told anyone it was 64bit. almost all CPUs sold today are 64bit(All AMD chips, and most of the intell chips), and the high end ones are duelcore(i heard there are plans for quadcore). the expected lifetime of a PC is 3 years. if the project takes 3 years to complete, you definitly should write it for 32bit and 64bit and multi-threading. some people might use a 32bit OS on a 64bit machine (this is currently so because people say windows XP 64 is crap), in which case the OS usually treats a 64bit processor as 2 32bit cores. therefore, a program should be tuned for 4 cores. graphics thread? this should be handled by the graphics card, not the CPU. my new computer, which should be built by wednesday has 2 1.2GHz GPUs, with 800MHz FSB and 400MHz RAMDAC, and with an upgrade can have upto 4GPUs, therefore graphics rendering should be expected to be done idealy by the graphics card, and not only purely by the graphics card, but also allow multi-threading graphics.
(i supose that means it is possible to run 2 games simultaniously, and the only bottlenecks would be FSB, RAM and Hard drive, but upgrading from a 400MHz FSB and RAMDAC, with 133Mb/s hard drive to a 1GHz FSB and 800MHz RAMDAC, with 300Mb/s hard drive, you might not notice so much(except for hard drive, because of seek time, unless i run from 2 seperate hard drives), although i expect this won't work in practice...).