4GB Memory Limit In 32-Bit Windows

Started by matrix2003, August 25, 2009, 09:50:10 PM

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Kadri

Quote from: matrix2003 on August 26, 2009, 04:56:16 PM
Hey Kadri!  Welcome aboard.  Guess we were on the same page!  Great minds think alike, so please post here again!
re: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=7348.0

Thanks, matrix2003,
İ am lurking for same times here but i am not very used to forums.But from now on it may change.İ have the free version of Terragen 2 and i had the older one to but this one is tough to handle.For now i am more reading(learning) then making nice renders.
This topik was interesting.Would realy know what Planetside thinks of this :)

Matt

Quote from: Kadri on August 27, 2009, 01:19:01 PM
This topik was interesting.Would realy know what Planetside thinks of this :)

There's not much we can do about it - it's not something which we can change in Terragen to take advantage of whatever workarounds the author may or may not be suggesting are available.

Personally I think the author is being a bit harsh on Microsoft. OK, so maybe it's a licensing issue. So what? Microsoft are allowed to license you (or not license you) whatever they like. You can choose which version of the OS you want to buy. The answer is simple: buy the 64-bit version :)

Matt
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

Matt

#17
Actually, there is one more thing that I was thinking when I read the article. Maybe it's a good thing that Microsoft are more clearly defining the liimits of 32-bit versions compared with 64-bit, because if you have a driver which isn't guaranteed to work with 64-bit then it may also have problems on 32-bit systems that are allowed to use PAE to go beyond 4Gb. I don't understand this stuff in enough detail to really go into it any further, but it seems to me like there may still be enough risks in going beyond 4Gb on 32-bit that you want some kind of easy label for the public. Enter "64-bit". Attaching a label to this and clearly defining limits on the 32-bit version is not necessarily the marketing evil that the author says it is. Try explaining these subtleties to a typical computer buyer - it's easier just to talk in terms of 32-bit vs. 64-bit.

Matt

P.S. I *really* don't know anywhere near as much about this stuff as the author of this article - I just think maybe the aspects of licensing and marketing may not have been considered as fairly as the technical details.
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

neuspadrin

I think it reall falls down to a computer can very easily become unstable if you put in all the memory hacks on a 32bit os to get your memory, as some people didnt write their drivers very well to support this (not ms fault, hardware vendors)

so to them, its safer to license properly and only give people who would usually need these things the license to use it.

heres one thing microsoft did license you to have (assuming vista, might work xp too duno) : free 64bit version instead of 32bit.  All you need is thee in to installation media, and your license should work 32 or 64bit.  microsoft WANTS people to ditch 32bit, why would they support all these lesser hacks when they want you to just finally go 64 since its VERY stable and can run almost ANYTHING.

the whole point of a 32bit os, is it has 32bits to count in.  This comes out to 4gb in binary, since each bit represents a 1 or a 0.  Sure you can hack it around with software to try to enable it to count more, but those will always have issues.  With a 64bit os you get 64bits, which gives you technically like...16 exabytes of counting or something like that.


jo

Hi,

I think if an app doesn't need access to more than 4 GB RAM (or 3 GB I guess) then it could be better off staying 32 bit. This is because if you go to 64 bit you can end up wasting a lot of memory if you don't watch how data is structured. This can make things slower for various reasons. Interestingly if the 32 bit app is performance critical ( like TG2 ) it may benefit from moving to 64 bit because under 64 bit you have more registers ( very fast places to store data in the processor ) available on x86 chips.

Even if you could access memory beyond 4 GB from a 32 bit app you still need to make sure that there's nothing in your app which is making assumptions about the length of a pointer or the size of blocks of data. Just having Microsoft change their licensing wouldn't make all apps magically work with more than 4 GB of memory. Anyway, the article is really talking about the OS having access to more than 4 GB of RAM and not applications having access to it. I suppose that would mean that you could run more applications using more RAM before paging started, but it wouldn't magically allow 32 bit TG2 to use more than 4 GB.

Regards,

Jo

Henry Blewer

A great many programmers have become lazy with memory allocation. Back in the 8 bit days, every bit of memory was important. Some new compilers don't allocate memory correctly. I some respects it is Microsoft's fault; they did not tell programmers to properly handle memory. Memory became inexpensive, so why bother doing the extra steps?
I think the programmers at Planetside remember the old style programming. 8)
http://flickr.com/photos/njeneb/
Forget Tuesday; It's just Monday spelled with a T

Cyber-Angel

Quote from: njeneb on September 22, 2009, 08:02:29 AM
A great many programmers have become lazy with memory allocation. Back in the 8 bit days, every bit of memory was important. Some new compilers don't allocate memory correctly. I some respects it is Microsoft's fault; they did not tell programmers to properly handle memory. Memory became inexpensive, so why bother doing the extra steps?
I think the programmers at Planetside remember the old style programming. 8)

Back in the days of 8bit, the good old days, the days of Centipede and Blue Meanies on the Commodore Vic-20 when the "POKE" command ruled along side the "Load Command" when you loaded programs into memory form cassette tapes.

In those days all the neighborhood kids would come too your house if your system had 1MB of memory which in those days was a lot; one can imagine that when IBM engineers where working on the systems architecture that they released and has been the corner stone of the PC market as we know it today (Remember on software boxes it read "Compatible with IBM and Compatibles" they had too think of an upper memory limit for technical specification reasons.

In the early years of computing when 8bit was the norm it was rear to find a system with more then 512K of memory, the ones there where consisted if memory serves mainly of mainframes: desktops it was rare too find one with more than 512K.

In these early years of which we are specking it is important too note that this is the era in the late seventies and early nineteen eighties before home video came in and with it the so called Beta-Max/ VHS format war. In this time frame, then, desktop computing was limited mainly to the corporate office environment, some hospitals and like environments: some social historians clam that the advent of the desktop (Now personal) computer sounded the death-Neil for the traditional secretarial typing pool.

;D

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel                           

cyphyr

Quote from:  Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of DEC"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of DEC
:)
reminded me of the above
Richard
www.richardfraservfx.com
https://www.facebook.com/RichardFraserVFX/
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Ryzen 9 5950X OC@4Ghz, 64Gb (TG4 benchmark 4:13)

Henry Blewer

Someone who designed the PC rom for IBM decided no one would ever need more than 640K of ram. This remained standard for many years. Fortunately things changed.
I hated pokeing and peeking. I learned Machine Language, then assembler. Basic was too limited and slow. I programmed for PC's on a Commodore 64, then a 128, and last an Amiga 4000. I really do not have any interest in programming anymore. I do not like C, and assembler has become obsolete. It's too bad, it was fun trying to cram as much function into a routine while using the least amount of ram. (sigh)

Happy rendering everyone!
http://flickr.com/photos/njeneb/
Forget Tuesday; It's just Monday spelled with a T

Kadri

İ tried to run Wing commander 3 in 1994 with a new sounblaster card and new(my first) cd room drive. it was a nightmare. İ remember  memmaker(?). it said 620 K free but the game wanted 630...anyway something like that . This was the time i had to know Dos deeper to run games. Nice and bad memorys  ;D

Kadri.

rcallicotte

Wing Commander 3 is still my all-time favorite game.  And then maybe Wing Commander 4...or was there a 4?
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

Kadri

Yes there was  ;)  But from there on it was ( for me anyway) downhill for the series. But i liked it much. These days i don't know where the joystick controller is.

Kadri.

rcallicotte

Thanks Kadri.  It's been so long ago, I forgot.  But, I bet I still have some of the CDs for those games.  Sold my joystick. 
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

matrix2003

Well much closer in my quest for 64-Bit.  Looked over my son's shoulder during a Windows-7 Professional 64 Bit install last night.  He got the upgrade through his college.  Went in like silk. Only change was to his BIOS, moved the drive to first check for boot, and away we go.  Options to blow out partitions etc.. very slick.
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