Question about 64bit OS and gaming

Hey my friend and I were discussing the advantages of 64bit OS's in gaming when we encountered the following question:

Most games massively compress texture data in order to save space and unzip them on the fly when needed during game execution. So a game that is only 5GB in size could easily reach 10GB if all of the available texture data were uncompressed into their highest resolution forms. Other game data also need to be fetched from the hard drive into main memory as needed---upon entering a new area in HL2 for example, resulting in the "loading" screens we see and wait for.

My questions is, if we ordered one of those rigs with 16GB of RAM and a 64bit OS that has the ability to Superfetch (ahem) and uncompress all of the game data into memory, would we do away with the loading screens all together?

 

Loading screens would most likely increase load time greatly / instantly but you would still get them (would be my assumption).

 

Depends on the game. If it keeps everything in (virtual) memory once loaded, then yes, you'd eliminate load screens (or at least make them instantaneous)

If it evicts data from memory when loading new levels and such, it would have to load everything in again when needed, in principle... SuperDuperHyperLightspeedFetch would probably help a lot here, but there would still be *some* loading involved. (at least uncompressing the data would need to be done again)

 

Hmmmmm anyone care to do a review of a Dell Blade server with 16GB of RAM then?

Actually, anyone have one lying around the workplace and the kutspa to try a few games out on it?

EDIT: Jalf, is the memory footprint size of any given game hardcoded or is it dependent on the system's configuration? Say if it's hard set at 200MB vs. X% of the system's available memory (physical + page).

 

Basically hardcoded. The game decides when it wants to request more memory from the OS. Of course, the game *may* be written to request more memory if it detects lots of RAM is available, but I doubt many games do that. There wouldn't really be much point.

It's also possible that Windows reserves larger chunks of "extra" memory when handling requests if lots of RAM is available. When allocating memory for an application, Windows always reserves a bigger chunk, so that it can use the "unused" part of that chunk to handle the next request faster. I don't know if this chunk size varies depending on the amount of installed memory, but again, I doubt it. Which means the memory footprint is basically hardcoded, yes