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fakemai wrote:This also bit the devs of the emulator Dolphin, where the costs of maintaining a 32-bit version were a lot higher, so they eventually dropped it.
Cacodemon345 wrote:My guess is that there are FAR more 64-bit users?
85% use 64 bit on a 64 bit system
10% use 32 bit on a 64 bit system. (This one's odd, I'd appreciate if some of these users can tell us why.)
6% use 32 bit on a 32 bit system
(duplicate reports bring this above 100%)
Gez wrote: I believe upgrades made from within the system also kept the architecture?
Gez wrote:That tells you that seven years ago, 32-bit systems were still a large part of the mainstream gaming computers.
Graf Zahl wrote:We should not forget that porting 32 bit code to 64 bit is not a problem-free transition. If they got 32 bit console code it made little sense to spend more time sanitizing it, when 32 bit was working fine. Besides, the limiting factor was not CPUs but Windows installations and back then 32 bit was still quite widespread.
Graf Zahl wrote:I think you are completely missing the real reasons here.
Why not D3D10? Simple: XP did not support it! You need to have some critical mass of potential users to justify the work. And Vista did not go down particularly well, remember?
So yes, the game industry skipped that iteration because it would have been suicide.
Why was D3D11 only adopted after 4 years of Windows 7? Actually the same reason: They had to wait until the market share was high enough to justify the work. I guess if D3D11 has been backported to XP and Vista we'd have seen more titles earlier.
Regarding OpenGL, the reasons are different: For many, many years Intel's and AMD's drivers had serious issues - so serious that few dared to go that route.
Graf Zahl wrote:And the long term roadmap should be clear: 32 bit and Windows XP along with it are on the chopping block. This will only be maintained as long as it doesn't cause any extra work and the percentage of real 32 bit systems remains significant enough. And I make absolutely no provisions on Vulkan to keep the code compatible with 32 bit.
Chris wrote:Graf Zahl wrote:I think you are completely missing the real reasons here.
Why not D3D10? Simple: XP did not support it! You need to have some critical mass of potential users to justify the work. And Vista did not go down particularly well, remember?
So yes, the game industry skipped that iteration because it would have been suicide.
Why was D3D11 only adopted after 4 years of Windows 7? Actually the same reason: They had to wait until the market share was high enough to justify the work. I guess if D3D11 has been backported to XP and Vista we'd have seen more titles earlier.
Convenient that D3D11 and 64-bit PCs hit high enough market share for everyone to latch on to right when the new consoles dropped.
I do very much believe if the new consoles had been released a year or two earlier, support would've picked up much quicker regardless of any changes to the PC gaming ecosystem. It's relevant to note that UT2004, released in early/mid 2004, came with both 32-bit and 64-bit executables on PC. Skyrim, released over 7 years later in late 2011, came as 32-bit only on PC despite the developer having done work internally to get it ready for the future 64-bit consoles (work that was only put on hold when they realized the new consoles were still a couple years out, not because PCs weren't ready). If my budget PC could handle a game released 3 years later, that game isn't targeting a gaming PC.
Sure, there's certainly an argument to be made about being exclusively 64-bit or exclusively D3D10/11 in the early years, but these games were exclusively 32-bit D3D9 for years. And now with the new consoles, they're exclusively 64-bit D3D11 (or D3D12 or Vulkan). Where was the transition period for PCs?
They only had serious issues because few games actually used them. id Software staunchly supported OpenGL even through its darkest times and showed it can work if they work with the hardware vendors. Individual developers could be in contact with the hardware vendors to ensure their games work, and in doing so would've raised the general quality of the drivers. Further, any ports for OSX, iOS, Android, and Linux required OpenGL, and OpenGL was also available for PS3 while D3D was not. So really, unless you were exclusively XBox and/or Windows, you were likely supporting OpenGL in some fashion anyway.
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