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When will EVE Online get a 64 bit client?

First post First post
Author
Prince Kobol
#101 - 2013-05-30 20:09:29 UTC
I WANT 256bit AttentionAttentionAttentionAttentionAttention

Come on CCP pull you finger out and give us 256 like yesterday AttentionAttentionAttention
Ager Agemo
Rainbow Ponies Incorporated
#102 - 2013-05-30 20:14:01 UTC
Victoria Sin wrote:
Ager Agemo wrote:
...the more the merrier.)



Actually in my experience, no, the more the not merrier. The reason is cache thrashing. Eager developer decides he can split his work out into 6 threads, one for each core. He profiles his program. Is it six times as fast?

No.

Why not?

Well, there's a huge amount of cache contention between the 6 threads. He's on average 1.3x faster than the single core solution was.

What to do?

Well, it can be done, but it's very hard. It involves messing around aligning your objects so they aren't on the same cache line, and that's just the beginning, because then he's got to make sure everything's being executed in a relatively orderly way, so he isn't wasting time in mutexes or spin-locks. And that's very hard to get right as well, because there's a massive bottleneck waiting for him down the line called the Graphics Card, which has a driver that's guarded to hell for single core access.




what you say is true, and I did mention it in some form in my BIG block of text, in 2 things, I mentioned each core would add maybe 50% more speed or about 1.5, not 100% and I did mention that Memory would need to be very fast as well we would have an overhead.

true its a coding hell but its doable, games like supreme commander can use up to 17 cores I think? (tho for some really minor tasks...) and bioshock could use up to 7.

I believe eve could be split in somewhere about:
1. Network
2. Game Logic (hp, stats, damage, etc)
3. UI
4. Graphics feed
5. Audio
6. Database (loading stuff to and from the disk as well allocating memory accordingly and queries to memory).
7. and a last thread for minor functions like (path finding for own ships, APIs, the game accessories like the browser, chatting, debugging, and for other future functions (mini games).


As an interesting thing I just though about, it might be possible to use this to overcome some of the limits of 32 bit architecture, by allocating different memory whenever possible to each thread you could get the game to use a lot more of memory despite being 32 bits).


Kijo Rikki
Killboard Padding Services
#103 - 2013-05-30 20:17:38 UTC
I may be just a simple country hyper chicken, but I do recall wow-64 running noticeably smoother, especially in heavy traffic in orgrimmar (not placebo), and the graphics even looked improved (possible placebo).

You make a valid point, good Sir or Madam. 

Medude
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#104 - 2013-05-30 20:20:59 UTC
I'll leave this here for the OP http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6WHBO_Qc-Q

On a slightly more sensible note if memory serves me correctly the biggest performance jump for EVE would be
going multithreaded on the server side
Victoria Sin
Doomheim
#105 - 2013-05-30 20:28:41 UTC
Ager Agemo wrote:


As an interesting thing I just though about, it might be possible to use this to overcome some of the limits of 32 bit architecture, by allocating different memory whenever possible to each thread you could get the game to use a lot more of memory despite being 32 bits).




That won't work. Threads are in-process. You'd have to do it out of process and that gives you a bit of a marshalling headache.
darmwand
Stay Frosty.
A Band Apart.
#106 - 2013-05-31 00:11:12 UTC
Haulie Berry wrote:

Well... there would be more bits.

32 more bits, in fact.

You know how in Eve, bigger ships are always better?

It's like that with bits, too.


However, your Computer will still be the same size but have more bits. Doesn't that make your bits smaller?

"The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp."

RubyPorto
RubysRhymes
#107 - 2013-05-31 00:17:53 UTC  |  Edited by: RubyPorto
Steve Ronuken wrote:
Super spikinator 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?


It isn't a minority. It is a majority.




Thankfully, it looks like only around 10-15% of Eve players are still running on XP.
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2954304#post2954304



You can run Windows 7 without a DX11 capable graphics card.

While my desktop supports DX11, I like being able to do my industry stuff from my laptop when I travel.

"It's easy to speak for the silent majority. They rarely object to what you put into their mouths." -Abrazzar "the risk of having your day ruined by other people is the cornerstone with which EVE was built" -CCP Solomon

Wyrm Drake
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#108 - 2013-05-31 00:40:53 UTC  |  Edited by: Wyrm Drake
Khira Kitamatsu wrote:
Ager Agemo wrote:
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.

Big smile 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 bits
currently 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 currently
given 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 currently
I 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.


Thank you Ager for making it more clear as to how a 64bit game client can improve EVE. I just did not have the time nor patience to explain in such detail. Because for them to continue to say there would be no improvement is just silly.




Lol, yer sooo predictable. Ager said nothing several others have not said, including myself. But this is the difference between someone that knows about computers compared to someone that thinks they know about computers. He comes to the sdame conclusion we do, but because he includes upgrading to 64bit, you thank him. No one has said they should not do 64bit, but that there are other ways to improve Eve long before 64bit as 64 is not going to give you as much improvement as you think it will. And I don't give a **** what you perceived in WoW, you ARE wrong. Regardless of what you think you experienced. It's a kind of placebo effect (I have seen it more times than you can imagine).

I am not saying they should not do 64bit at some point (especially if they get REAL AI). I would LOVE to see it. There are just many other things they can do that will give much more benefit than 64bit will.

Oh, and IDC what you think. I know your type all too well. You do NOT know what you're talkin about. But go ahead, keep lookin like a fool. It only hurts you.

Anyways, I am done with this thread cause when Ager says a lot of the same things others have said, just with a positive spin toward 64bit, but basically comes to the same conclusion as everyone else (threading first, 64bit last) you are only paying attention to what you WANT to hear and not reality.
Velarra
#109 - 2013-05-31 03:01:56 UTC
Ok this thread is great. :)

Not too seriously yet with some vague interest:

Has CCP considered coding up a native eve client for OS X? As a say...20% side project or something? (like that arcade machine, or the VR tech demo game). Yes i'm aware it'd probably be a herculean effort in light of DX related issues etc.
Drachiel
Mercury LLC
#110 - 2013-05-31 03:02:20 UTC
I would rather have the latest stable OpenGL than DirectX. DX is end of life, the GPU vendors have been forcing MS to update it for ages and now MS is done because they want to only develop "core" games on consoles, and have PC/Windows be only for casual games. DirectX is an EOL closed source API, which is a hair's breadth away from deprecated. OpenGL is the future of PC gaming and I'd rather see efforts there than anywhere else client tech wise.
Velarra
#111 - 2013-05-31 03:12:15 UTC
Drachiel wrote:
I would rather have the latest stable OpenGL than DirectX. DX is end of life, the GPU vendors have been forcing MS to update it for ages and now MS is done because they want to only develop "core" games on consoles, and have PC/Windows be only for casual games. DirectX is an EOL closed source API, which is a hair's breadth away from deprecated. OpenGL is the future of PC gaming and I'd rather see efforts there than anywhere else client tech wise.


*Humorous reference to Captains Quarters & its advanced, ground breaking, 3D technology here*

*Followed up by references to "Ambulation" and "18 months"!*

Big smile
James Amril-Kesh
Viziam
Amarr Empire
#112 - 2013-05-31 03:54:13 UTC
Haulie Berry wrote:
Look, you just don't understand.

Currently, we have this many bits:
.............................
And we COULD have THIS many bits:
........................................................

Do you not see how the latter is better in every conceivable way? The fact that they haven't already given us the extra bits we deserve is frankly indicative of gross negligence (or possibly even a bit-hoarding conspiracy) on CCP's part.

Well it's obvious you've bought into the misconception of "bigger numbers are always better in computing, right!?"

I bet you're one of those people who buys desktops with 32 GB of RAM.

Enjoying the rain today? ;)

Delen Ormand
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
#113 - 2013-05-31 04:03:06 UTC
darmwand wrote:
Haulie Berry wrote:

Well... there would be more bits.

32 more bits, in fact.

You know how in Eve, bigger ships are always better?

It's like that with bits, too.


However, your Computer will still be the same size but have more bits. Doesn't that make your bits smaller?


Personally, I have huge bits. Just sayin'..
Mr M
Sebiestor Tribe
#114 - 2013-05-31 04:56:56 UTC
Bollocks to 64-bit. Let's make it 128-bit right away. Just imagine the amazfabolous things it could do? 4000 fps when you're spinning your ship inside a station.

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Victoria Sin
Doomheim
#115 - 2013-05-31 05:50:06 UTC
Drachiel wrote:
I would rather have the latest stable OpenGL than DirectX. DX is end of life, the GPU vendors have been forcing MS to update it for ages and now MS is done because they want to only develop "core" games on consoles, and have PC/Windows be only for casual games. DirectX is an EOL closed source API, which is a hair's breadth away from deprecated. OpenGL is the future of PC gaming and I'd rather see efforts there than anywhere else client tech wise.


Also, with OpenGL you get D3D11 goodies on Windows XP (with OpenGL 4.2/4.3) and have some cross-platform compatibility (I mean without Whine etc.). However, if you're still running XP, I'm betting the rest of your machine is just about to explode, regardless of graphics card, so that is almost certainly not going to be the bottleneck.
Nightlund Audeles
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#116 - 2013-05-31 08:23:14 UTC
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?



Have you been asleep this whole time or maybe you should stop running EVE with everything on low.
Nightlund Audeles
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#117 - 2013-05-31 08:25:06 UTC
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?


Oh and for the record I sure do love those kind of people who talk out of their ass without knowing a thing about how a game is developed and maintained. Good job! Fail!
Marcus Harikari
#118 - 2013-05-31 09:07:54 UTC
No I love WinXP!!!
Adela Talvanen
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#119 - 2013-05-31 14:25:25 UTC
Given the fact that Microsoft is dropping support for XP in April next year, that may shrink the XP user pool down to the point that CCP may well be thinking about changing to 64 bit code, and multi threaded processors, and maybe calculating how much a new shard, or Tranquility 2 will cost, as the current Tranquility server is just like any other piece of electronic equipment, in that it has a sell and dispose of date as more advanced electronics with better capabilities are manufactured.
Debora Tsung
Perkone
Caldari State
#120 - 2013-05-31 14:39:39 UTC
Adela Talvanen wrote:
Given the fact that Microsoft is dropping support for XP in April next year, that may shrink the XP user pool down to...


no. everyone who's still using XP by now is either highly resistant to progress or cannot afford to upgrade his system.

So, our beloved XP crowd will stay with us until their PC's break down.

Stupidity should be a bannable offense.

Fighting back is more fun than not.

Sticky: AFK Cloaking Thread It's not pretty, but it's there.