Forums » General
Change in VO Windows System Requirements.
I imagine this will not impact many people, but as of today we are requiring a CPU with SSE2 to run the Windows version of the game. Depending on the system, this can make for a pretty meaningful bump in performance, and we're trying to get all the performance we can in advance of the 1.9 release (important for VR, and some new graphical features and content).
SSE2 is very widely supported, by basically every available new computer or processor, for over a decade. The only people who might remotely be able to still run the game (poorly) without having SSE2, would be those using the old AMD Athlon XP processors. Anything that is an Athlon 64 or newer will work. Similarly, any Semprons newer than the Paris CPU of July of 2004 will also work fine. Intel chips had SSE2 all the way back to the first Pentium4s in 2000, and the Pentium M. No, your ancient Pentium 3 will not work. Yes, any Atom netbook will still work (technically, and very slowly).
SSE2 is also required to even install Windows 8, 8.1 or 10, or even Microsoft Office, and is pretty widely required by games these days.
BUT, if you desperately need to make the game run on your ancient machine from 2003, we suggest installing Linux and using the 32bit Linux version. At this point, Linux is probably a better OS option for an old machine, rather than a Microsoft OS that's past end-of-life and lacking further security updates.
SSE2 is very widely supported, by basically every available new computer or processor, for over a decade. The only people who might remotely be able to still run the game (poorly) without having SSE2, would be those using the old AMD Athlon XP processors. Anything that is an Athlon 64 or newer will work. Similarly, any Semprons newer than the Paris CPU of July of 2004 will also work fine. Intel chips had SSE2 all the way back to the first Pentium4s in 2000, and the Pentium M. No, your ancient Pentium 3 will not work. Yes, any Atom netbook will still work (technically, and very slowly).
SSE2 is also required to even install Windows 8, 8.1 or 10, or even Microsoft Office, and is pretty widely required by games these days.
BUT, if you desperately need to make the game run on your ancient machine from 2003, we suggest installing Linux and using the 32bit Linux version. At this point, Linux is probably a better OS option for an old machine, rather than a Microsoft OS that's past end-of-life and lacking further security updates.
Will this effect if at all, any android devices?
No, this is purely a Windows version change. It has no impact on Android, iOS, MacOS, Linux, or even WinRT.
We will probably be dropping PowerPC support from the Mac version sometime soon, as well, but that's the only other substantial system requirement change we're expecting in the near future.
We will probably be dropping PowerPC support from the Mac version sometime soon, as well, but that's the only other substantial system requirement change we're expecting in the near future.
Even I stopped using my PowerPC, so go for it :)
How am I supposed to run VO on old versions of AIX without ppc support?
Run it in qemu I suppose. I never could get VO to run on my 7025-6F1 or my 9133-55A...
Does the 64-bit Linux version already have the SSE2 optimizations the new Windows builds will have?
Does the 64-bit Linux version already have the SSE2 optimizations the new Windows builds will have?
Does the 64-bit Linux version already have the SSE2 optimizations the new Windows builds will have?
Yes-ish? x86-64 implies SSE2, so it is optimizing for that. But right now they're purely compiler-side optimizations, and Visual Studio is probably a little more effective there. Now that SSE2 is an available option across most of PC (Windows, Intel-Mac, and Linux64), we may start to add some inline assembly / compiler intrinsics of our own for certain cases, which should work the same everywhere.
Yes-ish? x86-64 implies SSE2, so it is optimizing for that. But right now they're purely compiler-side optimizations, and Visual Studio is probably a little more effective there. Now that SSE2 is an available option across most of PC (Windows, Intel-Mac, and Linux64), we may start to add some inline assembly / compiler intrinsics of our own for certain cases, which should work the same everywhere.
Sooo, are we getting a Windows 64 bit build then? I would love for my plugin (abuttplug) to be able to leak into my full 16GB of RAM ;-)
It's a pretty major bandwidth and update-overhead cost for us to roll a 64bit Windows build. Because either we have to have a unified Windows version that pushes both and selects between them at an OS level (which more than doubles our per-update minimum binary/patch download size for Windows), or we have to roll a special 64bit "install" that also has to be concurrently maintained and updated, which is a pretty big hassle.
Back when we added Linux64, we had like.. four "platforms", total. Now we have a zillion freaking platforms, and it's becoming more challenging to manage. These days there has to be a really strong financial case for a new platform, before we'll commit the on-going time and energy to update it.
So, although I kicked around the notion of a Win64 version, I'm not going there right now. The SSE2 thing adds most of the performance benefit, and the ram overhead isn't really needed.
In other news, I have updated the official System Requirements in the FAQ.
Back when we added Linux64, we had like.. four "platforms", total. Now we have a zillion freaking platforms, and it's becoming more challenging to manage. These days there has to be a really strong financial case for a new platform, before we'll commit the on-going time and energy to update it.
So, although I kicked around the notion of a Win64 version, I'm not going there right now. The SSE2 thing adds most of the performance benefit, and the ram overhead isn't really needed.
In other news, I have updated the official System Requirements in the FAQ.
Nobody uses Windows anyway, focus on the platforms that matter!