Tim Sweeney 64-bit Interview

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The FiringSquad's Brandon Bell has been lucky enough to have had the chance to interview Epic Games' Tim Sweeney about AMD's 64-bit Athlon processor! Here's a snip:

Epic's Tim Sweeney has been advocating AMD's 64-bit platform since its official unveiling at Comdex last November. With this in mind, we decided to ask Tim about Epic's 64-bit UT2K3 port, Epic's 64-bit plans for their next generation Unreal engine, and his thoughts on the Opteron architecture. For all the details on Epic's upcoming plans, check out this article!

FiringSquad: Can you describe the process involved in migrating to AMD's 64-bit architecture? Has the transition been a difficult one?

Our goal in porting UT2003 to 64-bit was to show that it can be done without much work, that the platform is stable, and that it's ready for gaming. We're not doing anything that really takes advantage of over 4 gigs of RAM or the large virtual address space.

The next generation of the Unreal engine is where we'll be taking major advantage of 64-bit in a very visible way, in the 2005 timeframe. We expect to support 32-bit and 64-bit clients and servers for gameplay, but might require 64-bit for content creation, because of the significant requirements of our new content development tools.

Tim Sweeney 64-bit Interview