Batman Demands 12GB RAM For Windows 10 (steamcommunity.com) 309
An anonymous reader writes: Back in June, Warner Brothers removed Batman: Arkham Knight from sale after a lot of graphics and performance issues found on the PC version. Now, after spending five months trying to fix this mess, Rocksteady and Warner Bros re-released the game on Steam with some free Batman titles for those who acquired the launch edition. However, Warner Bros noted there are still a few caveats with Windows 10 users recommended to have 12GB of RAM to avoid paging issues: "For Windows 10 users, we've found that having at least 12GB of system RAM on a PC allows the game to operate without paging and provides a smoother gameplay experience." Some initial tests show no performance gains on the re-released version. Warner Bros claims that it's still working closely with its GPU partners in order to enable SLI/Crossfire for the game.
For what? (Score:2)
Re:For what? (Score:5, Funny)
Really Strange (Score:2)
Re:Really Strange (Score:5, Funny)
That's what he needs for contingency plans and backup plans. Batman never ponders where he left the Bat Shark Repellent - he just knows :)
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I think I'll just keep playing Civ I under DOSemu :)
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I think I'll just keep playing Civ I under DOSemu :)
I prefer Civ 2 on WinXP under vmware... (civ2 seems to punch lots of vms in the nuts, but not vmware.)
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You should try freeciv [freeciv.org]. It kicks ass.
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except textures are pretty shit, there are no high resolution textures in this game from PC point of view
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So how do you explain superior performance on consoles, then? And no, there isn't 11GBs worth of texture data difference between the PS4/XB1 and PC versions.
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Aside from there being less bloat on a console, the environment is also more predictable... You don't need to deal with crap running in the background, don't need to worry about different hardware and drivers etc... Consoles are much more efficient, so requiring 33% less ram is not unusual.
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Well, fortunately I returned my STEAM copy. Come to think of it, the Batmobil got on my nerves pretty soon in addition to the graphics breaking immersion all the time. Will not buy again. Well, maybe a $5 nice-price in a few years.
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Ditto. These days, I usually only buy games when they're $5 in a Steam sale.
Re:For what? (Score:4, Interesting)
A AAA game will never be in a humble bundle, and any reasonable sale price will take place after the game has been superseded long ago by something else as the new hotness.
Of course, based on your description, it doesn't sound like you'd get a AAA game at all. Fair enough, but they are very pretty, and often a lot of fun. Good dollar to entertainment ratio? Debatable, but if I play a $60 dollar game for a good 60 hours or more, I'm certainly doing better than I would with a movie.
As for 0-day and preorders? Yeah, that's just the same sort of thing that gets people in line for big movies. They don't want it spoiled, they want to get in on the "moment", and they want the new hotness *now*. There's a social effect there where they have been waiting for it, and all their friends are waiting for it. That's the the only time I have bought a game even close to 0-day: when I am either playing it with friends, or I want to be at the same place in the storyline.
Obviously, this is less of a concern for me as I get older.
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The Mass Effect trilogy for $4.80 was quite a deal (on PSN). I don't care about "the new hotness". I'll just wait until it's the _old_ hotness, and get it inexpensively. I already have far far more games than I'll likely ever play.. But at these kinds of prices, I don't mind if I start it on easy and only play for a couple of hours. I
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I grabbed that "deal". After about an hour into the first game, I realised that it sucked hard and haven't played it since.
Hmm, an hour into the game? So just past the first cut-scene, then?
Trust me, you're lucky you quit there, and didn't get as far as the second one.
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Instant gratification.
I don't understand how the PC gaming market works. You release a game that cost some $millions to produce, and you can't even get full price out of some customers.
I wonder how many problems, like day one DLC, micro transactions, etc, would go away if we were willing to pay the true cost of games development.
As gaming hardware improves, how can games dev be sustainable? We demand more graphical fidelity, richer, prettier assets, etc. Yet, sales numbers need to be ridiculously high to ju
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Right, my point is that people bragging about buying PC games when they're cheap, bragging about how nice they look and wondering why anyone would pay retail fail to realize that those games cost money.
Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are all making profit right now.
All the GPU and CPU power in the world is nothing with out assets and engines to actually use all of that power. Building those engines and assets cost time and money in the form of human effort(procedural generation won't save the industry here; th
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For the OS. The OS needs 8G. That leaves 4G for the game. Mostly textures and polygons.
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Windows memory requirements haven't changed since Vista. Windows 10 actually runs surprisingly well on 1GB RAM and for most everyday purposes there's very little subjective need to have more than 4GB on any version of Windows right now.
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I am so angry, just like when Kings Quest 5 stopped supporting CGA Graphics cards!
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Maybe I am missing something but do SSD have RPM, nothing spins in them, or has the metric just continued for comparison sake?
[Technology Reqest #37,395] Need 12GB RAM (Score:5, Funny)
-Batman
Re:[Technology Reqest #37,395] Need 12GB RAM (Score:5, Funny)
"Batman is Bruce Wayne: How Windows 10 Telemetry Helped the FBI Capture This Notorious Vigilante"
Another example of bloat (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another example of bloat (Score:4, Insightful)
My gaming PC from 2013 has 32GB. I've been waiting years for games to catch up with the hardware, but most have been crippled to run on crappy consoles.
Re:Another example of bloat (Score:4, Insightful)
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I agree. My gaming PC from 2009 has 16 GB of RAM that sits empty while the games slowly load assets from the spinning disc at preset intervals/locations. (Loading...) The CPU sits idling while the (single threaded, 32bit) AI process makes sure not to use any of it to make better behaving enemies/NPCs.
The only thing that is even remotely improving is the graphics, but my two seven year old middle-grade GPUs still let me play everything all maxed out.
Everything seems to be made for consoles and refuses to eve
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To be fair, the second time I load a game, it's faster, as all the files are cached in RAM. But the fscking thing still makes me wait while it plays half a dozen stupid videos, so it doesn't make that much difference.
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Dude, it's 2015. You can get one of those fancy SSD drives for like $50. If you have game that's spinning your platters, load it on the SSD.
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You can set up a RAM disk. What you are asking for is the OS to cache things smarter (and with some user hints), and frankly, this could be done.
But Java definitely isn't doing it.
Re:Another example of bloat (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another example of bloat (Score:5, Informative)
and to look at the Steam Survey [steampowered.com], only 14% of PCs have 12+ gig. 20% don't even have 4Gb.
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Why would you be trying to fill up your RAM? There's only so much RAM you can use at any given instance to render any given object on the screen. What do you get by having a game use that much? Insane load times? Heavy CPU loading? A bottlenecked PCI bus endlessly trying to push data back and forth from the graphics card because there's so much of it? Or maybe you want a game to cache to ram and load while you play directing resources away from the task of rendering your graphics just so you can get past yo
Re: Another example of bloat (Score:3)
> What do you get by having a game use that much?
You get to go to a 12-week "coding bootcamp" and write games. No bullshit wastes-of-time like learning how to write an efficient double-buffering routine. Just the exciting parts (and then you get to work 90-hour weeks).
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My gaming PC is pretty nice, although it's time to upgrade the graphics card.
Intel Core I7 8 core 3.6ghz overclocked to 4ghz with a corsair water cooler
32 gigs ram, low latency "gaming" ram
320 gig Solid State hard drive as the system "boot" drive
2TB Western Digital Black Hard drive for gaming/installs.
EVGA FTW Edition GTX 670 (the ftw editions are factory overclocked)
I haven't had ANY issues with any games Yet, but I know that graphics card needs upgrading soon.
but Witcher 3 on max I get 80 fps average, wit
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My gaming PC is pretty nice, although it's time to upgrade the graphics card. ...
EVGA FTW Edition GTX 670 (the ftw editions are factory overclocked)
I haven't had ANY issues with any games Yet, but I know that graphics card needs upgrading soon.
That card is (easily) in the top 27 (http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html - the GTX 670, not overclocked, is #27).
What would you even upgrade to? Above that, most of the prices are crazy high, though the GTX 970, at $315, may be worth considering, if you happen to get some games that it would help at all, and it's worth that much for a little bit better graphics on those select games. Just curious... why do you think it's time to upgrade?
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Just optimised and unbloated I think.
No, crippled. Most games aren't even 64-bit on Windows.
Even with a two-year-old PC, games barely use my CPU and barely use my RAM. They could do far more interesting stuff with modern hardware, if they weren't built for consoles with a fraction of the power.
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You have to love Bat-spaghetti.
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Ya, that all makes sense and one would assume a given. However, that would take more man hours and the devs would likely have to actually spend some time writing code, rather than just cut/paste chunks in and write a few lines to tweak or bridge (not that they couldn't do it - would just mean more resource allocation). This push it out the door as soon as possible and patch later paradigm (old and tired) is lately coming around to smack them in the face for the reasons you point out. The project managers
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Case in point: EA and Battlefield 4.
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This game ran great on my XBOX ONE console. I game mostly on my PC with a GTX780ti. But I take my XBOX ONE with my when I got on vacation and this year played Batman and this game is truly amazing looking and played great on the XBOX. I was amazed at how well the game let me drive the Bat Mobile around the city so fast and never had a stutter or slow down really.
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It's pronounced "xbone"
Batman is looking kinda pudgy..... (Score:2)
May John C. come save us from bad game coders, amen.
Re:Another example of bloat (Score:4, Insightful)
Nah, it's just shit coding. They screwed up the memory management so need to avoid paging to prevent performance issues. It's a mistake, and one that they can't seem to fix.
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I agree. They do test on smaller machines, but only at the end of the development cycle. Basically they're marketing to the sorts of people who spend $300 on graphics cards and who get a new machine every other year.
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At the very least, you'd think that *someone* within the company had a machine that represented minimum or recommended specs. And hopefully those people would test the game on those machines before they released it. You could even have an entire department devoted to doing this. You could call it something like "the quality assurance department".
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Possibly. Or management decided to ship it over the objections of all the technical people involved (both developers and QA). It's hard to say. But, I do 100% agree with your original post. If you develop on cutting edge hardware, you are highly likely to produce something that needs that cutting edge hardware. I even have experience doing this: Many moons ago I convinced my boss to get me a $50k Sun workstation to develop some visualization software. I worked at Sun so, internally, that wasn't a big
Ug.. no, it's not really (Score:2)
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Since when is 12GB RAM unusual for a new game?
New games have always stretched older machines. Most anything bought in the last 4 years or so can be equipped with 16GB RAM or more, if you just fork out the $$$.
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12GB is absolutely unusual for any game. Insanely so, considering that:
> It doesn't need 12GB with Windows 7, Microsoft's final OS.
> It doesn't need 12GB on the PS4, the top end console
> It doesn't need 12GB on the Xbone, Microsoft's current Wii-U competitor
Additionally, I play a decent number of games, and I don't have 12GB on my computer. Most have requirements substantially lower than that. Normally I play games on one monitor, voice chat on one monitor, and have two browsers with a couple do
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The real reason for shit like this is that publishers hand off the porting job to random crappy devs and give them untenable deadlines to do it.
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I built the PC I am typing this on in 2012. 16 GB of RAM was $79 back then. The motherboard was $89, made by Intel and can support 32 GB RAM. It has USB 3.0, as well. The entire PC was built for something like $650.
Sure it didn't have a screaming GPU or an i7, but I can add that later if I want. The bottom line is that my $650 PC build quite easily included 16 GB of RAM for less than $100, in a consumer grade motherboard. It's not outlandish.
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Oh it's not just developers and their workstations. Give a development team access to a high speed network and they soon forget that other people aren't always accessing the website over a fast connection so you end up with bloated graphics, videos, any other files. Never mind trying to get developers to remember that your site has an international audience that includes poorer countries with bad connections and not always the best of computers. (I've had to remind the makers of a couple government websi
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Yep, there's something to be said about that. I've been on the opposite end, though. You see, devs have to run the game in debug mode. If you don't have cutting edge machines, you can barely play the game and debug it at the same time. I've worked at a studio where we had very middle of the road machines, and the problem is that for a large portion of the dev schedule, the game is slow even in release mode. It's inefficient to optimize code while it's still being changed on a daily basis. You have to
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I can't argue with that, considering that most computers today come with 8GB RAM and a 64-bit OS. I won't say that we'll never see 12GB as the standard, but for the time being, they should be writing games for what people have now, not for what they may have ten or fifteen years in the future.
Re:Another example of bloat (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually I really miss the early days of Origin when the games would come out and if your machine was a year old it wouldn't really work. The wing commander series pushed those machines to the limit and I remember messing with autoexec.bat and config.sys to get the games to work without getting a page overflow.
Games should push the limits. And sure that means there will be a decent number of people who can't play their games without buying an upgrade, but I don't have a problem with that.
That said, building a game which is just lazy and poorly coded and saying that it needs 64gb of ram is a different story.
Weird definition of game (Score:2)
"Games should push the limits."
Weird definition of game you have there. I don't care if it pushes the limit or just lies on the sofa, bottom line for me is a game should be enjoyable, e.g. fun.
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You're on Slashdot. A good number of us, I don't know how many, enjoy tweaking, poking, and even breaking stuff just for fun. For us, that is enjoyable. No, I am not a gamer. However, if I'm not pushing my hardware to the limits and breaking something then I'm not learning and I like learning new things. Breaking stuff in new and interesting ways is a way of life for some of us.
Business decision (Score:2)
And sure that means there will be a decent number of people who can't play their games without buying an upgrade, but I don't have a problem with that.
Yeah, but the guys who risked their money and years of their life to develop your game might.
W10 (Score:2)
Chuckle (Score:4, Insightful)
More evidence for the " Wait till it's been out at least a year and it's $20 on Steam before picking it up " argument.
Never, ever pre-order anything. Ever.
I wouldn't even give a new game a serious look until at least six months have passed. For the sole purpose of ensuring the game is playable, the servers aren't overloaded ( if an online game ) and the majority of the game killing bugs are located and remedied.
My life isn't over if I don't get to play a game on release day. In fact, now that I think about it, my life is a whole lot less stressful if I wait and play it later.
Re: Chuckle (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm going to pre-order Fallout 4 in a few day. Try and stop me, Batman! Hahahahahahahahahahaaaaaa
obligatory XKCD - Cutting Edge (Score:2)
https://xkcd.com/606/
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More evidence for the " Wait till it's been out at least a year and it's $20 on Steam before picking it up " argument.
That's a viable tactic, so long as it's not a league-licensed sports game and not from a publisher that likes to shut down the online matchmaking servers after a couple years.
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I only preorder to reward past outstanding work (which I bought for cheap on steam), as a way to give something back.
So far it mostly was a solid strategy.
Of course due to backlog I never play on release day either, often when the game price finally goes down to budget it still sits untouched in the library.
So maybe I shouldnt buy any more games at all...
Memory? (Score:5, Funny)
8K of Bat-RAM (Score:4, Informative)
buy his own damn Bat-RAM.
In fact, that's exactly what Sunsoft did for Batman: Return of the Joker for NES. It comes with 8K of Bat-RAM [dyndns.org] on top of the 4K built into the NES it runs on.
Wolf3D, Doom, Quake... (Score:5, Insightful)
And here we come to the crux of what it means to be a truly great developer. Optimizations, both memory and performance, are difficult. Anyone can throw something together that is slow, bloated, and requires tons of physical resources to work half decently. Just like you can write anything you want in Visual Basic, because, after all, it is turing complete.
So this brings me to my subject - Wolf3D, Doom and Quake. What made those games amazing weren't the algorithms. Most of the concepts, like binary spacial partitioning, and the various 3D mathematics involved to translate and transform points, etc, have been around for close to a century now. What was amazing about those games is that they ran very well on the incredibly slow and RAM-limited hardware of the era. It took tremendous amounts of pre-processing and every trick in the book for those games to be lean and mean enough to not be a slideshow and have decent rendering quality.
Which brings us to the counter example of all of that: Batman: Arkham Knight.
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Optimizations, both memory and performance, are difficult.
Not difficult, but tedious and time consuming, something directly at odds with deadlines and performance KPIs pushed by management. It's not about being a truly great developer, it's about being given the opportunity to be a truly great developer.
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Optimizations, both memory and performance, are difficult.
And typically take older, more experienced (read: $$$$) folks to do right. H1-Bs need not apply.
Not a bad thing (Score:2)
So what? (Score:2)
Bruce Wayne can afford 12 GB and then some. His superpower is money.
Solves one mystery at least (Score:3)
So that's why I keep seeing the Crucial logo projected on clouds with searchlights.
Wait a minute (Score:3)
Is this Batman? Or Fatman?
Now go check out x-plane (Score:2)
Just another example... (Score:2)
...of how out of touch the billionaire class is with the average American. Bruce Wayne should be ashamed.
Things have changed (Score:2)
sod the bloody Bat-Man (Score:5, Informative)
If you want a game where you play a surly dude who runs around an open world kicking ass, go get Shadow of Mordor on Steam right now. It's on sale for like $17, and instead of a gay Batmobile, you get to hop on the backs of these giant beasts and behead orcs to your heart's content. And the first time you take out a warlord, you'll stand up, grab your balls and do your best Macho Man Randy Savage voice, yelling, "I did that thing. Oh yeah." With the money you'll save, you can buy a pizza and a case of beer.
Trust me. Don't let this Arkham Knight make you feel like you're some trick who was robbed before the panties dropped. Go play Shadow of Mordor, or if you're the sort that needs the self-affirmation of paying full price for a game, get Mad Max and you can blast around the Wasteland in a Jesus-built hotrod and kick ass.
And you won't need five fucking Cray supercomputers configured in a Beowulf cluster to play those other games. Take control of your PC gaming life for god's sake and quit sniveling.
https://youtu.be/8C4lK41SX-Q [youtu.be]
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a Jesus-built hotrod
Well, ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long!
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Not the way I do it, it isn't.
Oh dear oh dear (Score:3)
Just another example... (Score:2)
...of how out of touch the elite billionaire class is with the average American. Batman ought to be ashamed.
oh good (Score:2)
Glad to hear they're working hard on making the game not run unless you buy more hardware. Good job, guys.
Obligatory Alfred quote (Score:3)
So what? (Score:2)
Even my server from from 2009 has 32GB ram. I've installed 24GB and 16GB in my wife's desktop and my own years ago.
You almost can't have too much RAM installed. Makes great cache when you're not running a big pig of a game.
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While I agree with you, PC manufacturers didn't get the memo. They are still stuck with 4GB, or maybe 8GB on high end PCs. RAM prices didn't help us avoiding that plateau. RAM was cheaper 3 years ago than it is now.
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I agree. If you're in the PC gaming crowd you generally know you're in for the regular upgrade cycle. My gaming rig had 16GB years ago.
That's why I got out of PC gaming and moved to the console (sacrilege I know). I just found that I didn't enjoy constantly upgrading and tinkering with my machine. Don't get me wrong, I loved it for many years and learned a ton in the process. I just have other ways I'd rather spend my time and money these days. Now, if my kid ever gets into gaming...
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When I built mine I planned on the max - 32GB. If it would have taken 64, that's what i'd have put in. If you like to game - it's kinda a given that you max your ram at the highest stable speed the Mobo will allow. Not crazy at all IMHO.
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Yeah, but having a lot of RAM means that you also have plenty of space for cache and that's very comfortable.
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What's comfortable is going back to the desktop and the browser's memory has (mostly) not been paged out to disk and there's still gigabytes of disk cache. Although 8GB should usually be enough for this.
Re: Oh, fine (Score:3, Funny)
That's simply not true. The basic functionality (cmd.exe, telemetry and NSA reporting) works fine with just 4Gb.
Windows 10 is heavier (Score:2)
Or perhaps the game uses the entire 8 GB of a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One console's RAM and needs 12 GB on PC because Windows 10 is so much heavier than Orbis OS on PS4 or whatever Microsoft calls the XbOne's operating system.
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You mean 4 GB?
No. By default, Windows caps 32-bit applications at 2GB.
This is one reason heavily-modded 32-bit games crash a lot.
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That's true, but it is possible for 32-bit applications to use up to 4GB when run on 64-bit Windows if the application is compiled with the right options.
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It has 2 supporters, one of which commented "I signing this because I'm stupid."
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"640K of Ram should be enough for everybody"
-old quote on top of Slashdot page, making fun of a misquote, when it was ran as a hobby enjoyment before it sold out literally and figuratively.
dammit now Ive made myself sad, with nostalgia back to late 1997-2000 Slashdot