Frostbite 2 Game Engine Will Require 64-bit OS in 2013

Frostbite 2 is the powerful game engine released in 2011 by EA's Digital Illusions CE (DICE) devs, famous for developing the Battlefield Series.

With the introduction of the Frostbite 2 engine gamers have been pushed away from DX 9 and now it looks like DICE and EA’s new engine will be forcing gamers to use a 64 bit Operating System (OS). In a tweet from Johan Andersson, a rendering architect of the Frostbite Engine Team at DICE, he mentions that Frostbite 2 games will not run on a 32-bit OS by next year.

“We'll have Frostbite-powered games in 2013 that will _require_ a 64-bit OS. If you are on 32-bit, great opportunity to upgrade to Windows 8”

Current games using Frostbite 2 are Battlefield 3, Medal of Honor: Warfighter and Need for Speed: The Run, all of which can be run on a 32 bit system. It has also been confirmed that Command and Conquer: Generals 2 will make use of the engine and it is rumored that Mirror’s Edge 2 and Dead Space 3 will as well. Both Generals 2 and Dead Space 3 have expected release dates in 2013 making them candidates for a 64-bit OS requirement though it might be an EA/DICE move which would exclude these titles.

There are positives and negatives to this move. Clearly EA and DICE are trying to push forward graphics technology standards but will it be at the expense of huge numbers of gamers who do not want to run 64-bit OS? While it might be easy to vilify EA for this move, somebody had to do it. There are serious technical advantages to using a 64 bit over 32 bit and it was simply a matter of time as the PC becomes ever more powerful. To my knowledge most 32 bit CPUs are single cores, and their systems are incapable of using more than about 4GB of RAM, which would not have enough power to run these games anyway. Unfortunately, there are still many people who have a 32 bit operating system.

Here is the full tweet by Johan Andersson: link

What do you think? Is 2013 a bit early for 64-bit OS only games or do you think most gamers looking to use graphics as powerful as those offered by Frostbite 2 have moved past 32-bit OS?