need help if you have 64bit AND 32bit.

[andrewjohn81]

I'm looking for some real evidence of speed increases from 32bit to 64bit. I know that it isn't always beneficial, but IT wants to know if it would actually benefit us or not with the work we currently do, and how much.

Can someone render an interior scene using GI as well about 3k on 64bit as well as a comparable 32bit machine? The amount of memory doesn't have to be comparable as that is one of the large advantages of using a 64bit machine, being able to slap in 16Gigs of memory, or more if you have an insane wallet, and be able to utilize most of it.

All I'd really need is render times for both.


I'm sure this data exists somewhere but I couldn't find it. Please let me know if you have it already linked or something. IT really doesn't want us to use a 64bit OS because it'd be a huge pain on their part, but my boss has made it one of my yearly goals to switch us over to 64bit.

We also use after effects and photoshop a lot, so if you know of any info on that too that'd be sweet.

If you've got a few minutes to compare the times I'd appreciate it.

[percydaman]

i thought I read somewhere that vlado said there would be a negligent speed increase from 32bit to 64bit if any at all.

[EricKlein]

For us it's not speed but Memory allocation...what i'm really curious about though is whether or not there's a major difference between 32 bit OS with the 3gb switch tripped and a straight up 64bit OS...anyone? It seems here that if we send out a BB job with 32 bit ticked, and our mixed farm picks it up, there's really no difference between what either OS can handle, given the same amount of ram.

Eric.

[percydaman]

funny, reading in the fryrender forum, the developers have said there's a pretty sizeable speed increase between 32 and 64bit in their renderer.

[EricKlein]

At this point it seems they'll say anything~ I'm really curious to see what the 'real-time' flythrough solution turns out to be...

e.

[Neilg]

Re: need help if you have 64bit AND 32bit.

I'm looking for some real evidence of speed increases from 32bit to 64bit. I know that it isn't always beneficial, but IT wants to know if it would actually benefit us or not with the work we currently do, and how much.

My boss went through this when he was considering the 32bit/64bit, and it took a while to explain that although it costs a lot more, theres no immediate difference - what it changes is the size of scenes/textures/psds you can work on, lowers the optimisation you need to do on scenes when they fall over, and various other things.
Any speed change is negligible and shouldnt be why you get it.

Its not something that can be measured the same as processor speed, youre just going to have to explain this to them.

[DanielBrew]

I've just tested it with the VRay benchmark scene and as others have said there is not much difference between Max 9 x86 and x64. I tried it a few times and the x64 is consistantly about 3% quicker.

Max 9 32 bit


Max 9 64 bit


Dan

[Dynedain]

If your scene is very heavy with a lot of geometry, displacement, or very heavy textures, then 64bit with more memory will be faster than 32bit. Because the machine will be able to store and address more stuff in active memory simultaneously.

However, something that renders just fine in 32bit and isn't being throttled by memory limits, will render in pretty much the same amount of time on 64bit.

Clear as mud right?

And 64bit Windows can run both the 32bit and 64bit versions of Max. So if your current systems are working fine for the kind of work you do, you don't need to replace them just for the sake of getting 64bit support. But any new systems you purchase should be 64bit as you'll need it sooner or later.

[Blitterswitch]

I have moved our place over to sole xp64 use with 3ds max 9 64bit and Vray 64bit.

My reason for this was that we are moving towards producing more walkthroughs. When I was calculating the lightcache previously on a machine with only 4gb and the /3gb switch 3dsmax would fall over after it went past the memory limit.

Now we have 8gb in the machines and can do minute long camera walkthroughs in pretty much any setting and not have to worry about running out of memory.

32 bit was fine for standard stills - 64 bit for animations (and a shed load of memory)

[DrJan]

Recently I've switched to 64-bits Windows XP to be able to use all four GBs of RAM in my system. However, after talking with some people on another forum I've decided to stay with 32 bits Max and VRay because, according to them, it's a bit more stable then the 64 bits version.

I haven't been able to test that because not long after that my motherboard and power supply got fried... My system got a little too hot

[Neilg]

64 bit did have problems back in the day, but since moving I get maybe one crash every 2 weeks, rather than a couple a day.

Zero stability problems here, all through our office and from everyone I know on it too.

[andrewjohn81]

this sort of confirms what I was hearing piece by piece other places. 64bit isn't much faster at all. On one site it said that it could be 11% faster if the instruction sets were completely optimized, but never would be faster as far as pure processing goes. Considering that, if it's actually 3% here then that's pretty good.

I figured it would be faster on images that take us several hours though because I'm guessing much of that is due to memory limits. If someone could do a test of the same image, but make it really big I'd like to see the numbers there.

It sounds like the true advantage is simply being able to render things that you previously couldn't. It's really hard to quantify how much time we'd save by not having to optimize something. We've worked most of that into our workflow already so I don't see that being much of an issue. I suppose we could just raise our settings hit render and not worry about noise, but time Does become an issue at some point as well. I don't want to raise the quality of something past the point where it's noticeable anymore either.

Our IT is giving us such a hard time about it because they have to make a secure build of XPx64 for us if we want to use it. It might not be worth the hassle at this point. We'll probably have to have a job or two that we just can't render. Until then we'll be stuck.



Any one here having luck with running a 32bit OS and software and submitting to 64bit? That would be an option for us because our renderfarm machines are connected only to our computers using a separate network card on a faster network hidden from IT. I asked IT and we already have the licenses for it so it doesn't cost anything. I might try doing that on one machine if you guys don't have any experience with it. i'd like to hear from someone hear first though if it's already being done.

[Animato727]

Were doing 32 OS and submitting through BB to 64 XP just fine. So far.

[andrewjohn81]

no lighting changes or extra crashes?

That might be a good option for us. The only downside is we couldn't render on our own machines overnight as well since they would be only 32bit.

I found out our IT already has licenses for 64bit, so there would be no cost in upgrading. I might experiment with that on a couple machines on the farm to see how it goes. I'm just waiting for vray sp1 before doing anything. I'll test it with max'08 too since we'll be installing that on all the machines probably mid december.


How long have you been running it like that Animato? Those are good results to hear.

The only problem I've heard of is if you have tons of stuff in the modifier stack, but comming from a Maya background I'm not quite that crazy and only keep the actually useful parts of the stack in there. Usually only 2-3 modifiers, if any more than just a UVW.

[pixelstudio]

we had problems in 3dsmax with 64 and 32 bit. seemed max files from 64 bit crashed on the 32 bit machines. dunno if this problem still exists. but thats the reason we still work on the 32 bit version