Overall quirks with moving to 64bit?

[cgrant3d]

Ok, so I've dragged my feet on this one for quite a while now but I'm gearing up to make the jump to 64 bit. What are the overall quirks you guys see when moving to 64 bit and and which windows platform (vista vs xp) are you using?

I'm using max 2008 and soon 2009. I know I'd need recompiled plugins but VRay is the only one I really can't go without. I know scripting doesn't support ActiveX in 64bit... What else? Do all the Adobe apps work? Anyone know whether Revit /Autocad work? Backburner works but does it work well? Does anything crash more or less in 64 bit? Any video display quirks?

I'm not looking for whether its possible but whether most of the annoying quirks with 64 bit have been eliminated. Truth be told most of the time I can work fine in 32bit mode but I want to keep pushing forward the level of quality in our work and to that extent moving to 64bit is the next logical step to help make that happen.

Thanks,

[mikeh]

the worst part about going to 64 bit was not the software but the hardware. The graphics cards drivers are poor. My cheapy cards on my slower 32 bit machines way outperform the Nvidia quadro 3500 i have.
mh

[dlparisi]

Just a few quircks that I've noticed... My old cheapo scanner ($75 Canon Canoscan LIDE) doesnt have a driver and quicktimes don't show a slider bar along the bottome wihen playing in internet explorer.

A slightly more annoying software quirk is on my renderfarm-a small program called ipnmac to allow me to set the IP address on my IPMI network card doesn't function in x64. Need to boot to dos and run it from there.

Overall though it was pretty painless and no more crashing. Even though I don't recommend it, I've pushed some of my x64 farm machines well past their physical ram (like 3.5 gb on 2gb machines) and the cpu usage generally stays close to 90-100% even with a lot of proxies. I simply increase the dynamic limit and it doesn't need to keep loading and unloading the proxies. Prior to x64 I'd have to lower the dynamic limit and then it was quite obvious when it was loading and unloading geometry.

[Neilg]

Audio hardware (just incase you work from home/do audio in work)
Obscure/old plugins.

Going by this:
"Do all the Adobe apps work? Anyone know whether Revit /Autocad work? Backburner works but does it work well? Does anything crash more or less in 64 bit?"

You'll be fine. We're on xp64 and have no problems - didnt use vista because we did it all last year and it was rubbish back then.

[tricky]

We have had lots of headaches.

Can't get good drivers for our FireGL V350 cards. Display performance is rubbish for these so-called hi-end (1GB!!!) cards.

We model in ADT and file-link into Max9. This is fundamental to our pipeline. File linking into Max9 64bit is unstable and unusable so we are having to use Max9 32bit!

In a nutshell, the move to 64bit for our office has been pointless as we cannot use 64bit Max and ADT hasn't been re-written for a 64bit OS (even installing ADT 2008 was problematic requiring some weird 'hack').

All in all, not impressed.

[dlparisi]

File linking into Max9 64bit is unstable and unusable so we are having to use Max9 32bit!

Perhaps it's because I use vanilla Autocad instead of ADT, but for me File linking under x64 hasn't had any problems. I use it daily on large and small projects and it works just fine. Using Max 9-64 bit.

[dlparisi]

Do all the Adobe apps work? Anyone know whether Revit /Autocad work? Backburner works but does it work well? Does anything crash more or less in 64 bit?

I'm running the CS3 Production Bundle (PS, AE, Prem., Illus., Flash....) and haven't noticed anything running oddly or unstable.

Still on Acad 2006 and it runs fine in XP pro x64.

Crashing is really about the same, I doubt that anything has really changed much between 32 and 64 that would make programs crash more or less. If there's a glitch in the software, etc it'll crash the same in 64 the same as it will in 32. Of course the extra available memory can keep some programs from crashing less which is a huge bonus.

[Morne]

Running Vista 64 bit and its purring like a kitten

[^Lele^]

If you own standard hardware, drivers should be well mature by now.
Me, i found speed and reliability, and just the aforementioned odd quirk with minor apps.
Overall more than worth it (Xp, that is).

[sv]

Quicktime = Nightmare.

We've got loads of machines x64, quicktime works ok on some, others it can take a few minutes to open a simple file.............no 64 bit version planned either I believe so some people are just f*cked with using Quicktime.
Can really affect flash - import speeds are really slow even though the machines are kick-ass - especially with AFX & Quicktime, sometime's it becomes almost unusable...

but for Vray it's wonderful, so what do you do?

[cgrant3d]

Great feedback everyone. Its really useful to hear what little issues we're going to run up against.

On the issue of quicktime - presumably that means that iTunes doesn't work either right? That'd be a bummer, but worst case I could always sync up to another machine. Is it the quicktime player that doesn't work or does it affect encoding as well?

[sv]

no; it all works, as x64 can emulate 32-bit so the programs do work (or something like that - different story for printers / drivers / some other stuff) so you can have itunes and quicktime, it's just that we've found Quicktime to be REALLY tempermental on some machines - i've got an old x64 workstation that i've stopped using as my main machine, and you can't un-install QuickTime off it, or repair it, or anything, so basically it needs a format to get it working properly again.......annoying!

Some of the importing or opening of Quicktime files is ridiculously slow on some x64 machines we've found, which is a pain in the arse, but then again you can render with almost infinite RAM with Vray, (or as much as you can buy!) so there are huge pro's and some overlookable con's....

[mike_kennedy]

Quicktime works as long as you not using a 64 bit app to access it, Itunes works, they both have some issues, like the missing play bars in Browsers, this happens in Firefox as well....
Itunes can automatically update itself but you can do both Itunes and Quicktime manually.
Other than Quicktime we are fine with 64 bit and even the Quicktime stuff is more annoying than a show stopper.