Just doing some development towards a 64 bit version of Ventuz. It´s already working as you can see above but there are still some issues to fix. A 64 bit version will give you the possibility to use more than 1.4 Gb memory for the Ventuz process. But don´t expect to build scenes with a million nodes that run smootly. The Garbage Collector of .Net might upset your plans.
If your scene gets really big Ventuz will hold a lot of objects which have to be inspected by the GC. This might cause render stalls. But you can use more and bigger resources. If your graphics cards has 4 GB you can use a lot of images and textures in your scene, highly tessellated models etc… YEAH – no problem!
Unfortunately some APIs that Ventuz depends on have no 64 bit version. For example Quicktime. This means no QT in the 64 bit version of Ventuz as long as the guys from Cupertino are not able to build a 64 bit version of Apple Quicktime.
Tags: 64 bit, Development, Memory
Will both versions be compatible? Of course if the 32bit memory limit is not reached. Then if you have projects that require quicktime playback you could use the 32bit edition but still access scenes made in the 64bit one.
With the annpoucement of Mac OSX Snow Leopard at the WWDC on Monday 8th June to be released in September this year and the completely rewritten architecture and the optimization tun run fully and native 64-bit, i think it will not last to long to get a 64-bit Quicktime API. The completely new Quicktime X is also one part which runs then 64-bit in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. (See http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/#quicktimex)
Hopefully we will get a 64-bit Version of Ventuz very soon!!!
Any time schedule for that?
Karol, which other APIs you are talking about not to be 64-bit compatible??
@ The Krix: Both versions will be compatible.
@ mbeekay: Thanks for the hint! The other API which is currently not supported on 64 bit is DMX.
Did not tested all the Audio/Video codecs…
The Quicktime API (SDK) is very very 32bit based. All pointers, handles and tokens are 32bit. To deploy a real 64bit API Apple has a huge job to do. The SDK was born in the early 90’s (and it still looks like that). As long the SDK is not a profit center for Apple, I guess that the community has to suffer…