Up for 64-bit Windows in 2008?
March 5th, 2008 by Luc-Eric - Viewed 14840 times - Popularity: 79% [?]I think this will be the year that 64-bit Windows really takes off.
We’ve getting more 64-bit machines out to developers and testers. The advantages and problems of 64-bit are pretty much the same as two years ago, when I first wrote about the lack of QuickTime support on 64-bit.
32-bit on 64-bit
The first thing you need to know is that 64-bit Windows can all of the 32-bit application with no noticeable performance loss. They are not emulated. However, Windows 64-bit no longer runs 16-bit dos applications, for example those with the .com extension.
There is also a little-known benefit to running existing 32-bit apps under 64-bit Windows. Under 32-bit Windows, applications are limited to using 2 gigabytes of RAM. This can be bumped up to 3 gigabytes with the /3G switch in boot.ini.
Under 64-bit Windows, however, these same 32-bit application can each access 4 gigabytes of RAM. So let’s say you have 8 gigabytes of RAM, you could have 4 gigabytes for your 3D apps, and 4 gigabytes for other applications such as Photoshop, your compositor, ect.
And of course, we have a 64-bit version of XSI which can use all of that RAM.
There are some drawbacks associated with using the 64-bit version of XSI.
First, the QuickTime SDK is not available is not available for 64-bit applications, so reading, writing and capturing to this format is not available in the 64-bit version of XSI. The list of AVI codecs is also very short. You’ll have to use the 32-bit version of XSI to access more codecs.
Secondly, python integration apears to work on Windows XP 64-bit, but apparently there is presently a problem under Vista, which is being investigated.
Finally, you will need 64-bit versions of all shaders and plug-ins you need.
Note that the 64-bit version of XSI isn’t faster than the 32-bit version in simple scenes. The benefit is the ability to use more memory.
Stephen has been putting answers to common 64-bit questions on Softimage Wiki
The Vista Factor
I recommend to people thinking of going 64-bit to go straight to Vista.
Microsoft has stopped working on Windows XP 64-bit more than 4 years ago, so it’s not really a good horse to bet on. The driver model for Vista is different than XP for many things, so it’s likely that new device drivers will be made only for Vista, and the holes in XP 64-bit will never be addressed. Vista is of course more than one year old now, and the graphic drivers are up-to-date.
Unfortunately, there are a few graphical glitches with XSI under the new Vista visual theme. We’ll be looking to fix these in the next major release of XSI.
The source of the display glitches are mainly the interaction between the new GPU-based desktop compositing with the OpenGL views and some common drawing tricks that we can do differently in the future. If you run Vista with the Vista Basic or “Windows Classic” theme, it reverts back to looking like Windows XP and all of these glitches go away.
Windows Vista runs pretty well here with all the glossy effects and OpenGL, but I do have a pretty beefy graphics card.
The Windows Classic theme makes Vista very fast and reminiscent of Windows 2000 and the graphic performance is pretty much the same it ever was, since it turns off desktop compositing. I took the somewhat controversial step of disabling UAC on my machine, which further makes Vista work like XP used to and complicated a few development-related tasks. It’s possible to use the classic start menu, as well, for example if you’re used to using the Windows Key as a shortcut.
Stephen has also put up a list of currently known issues for Vista on the Wiki.
One thing that I did not expect is that everything in Vista 64-bit is indeed 64-bit, including Windows Explorer. If you have software, for example WinRAR, that install a content menu item, they usually won’t show up, because they are 32-bit extensions and can’t be used in the 64-bit version of Explorer. It’s a little irritating (and the same applies to XP 64-bit). The WinRAR app itself runs, it’s the Explorer context menu extensions that do not.
It’s possible to run the 32-bit version of Explorer to get these items. 32-bit plug-ins can’t be used by 64-bit applications, and all applications, including XSI, will have this problem. So that means that if you use 64-bit Windows, you need to understand the difference between 64-bit and 32-bit, it’s not totally transparent.
If you use Visual Studio, you can use it to compile and debug 32-bit or 64-bit applications and plug-ins, even though it is itself a 32-bit app, but it is not available for the free Visual C++ Express Edition.
I’m sure somebody will ask about a 64-bit version of XSI for Linux 64… I believe this will happen in the future, but no announcement has been made yet.
Popularity: 79% [?]
I love this blog ( nearly as much asn XSI = ) Honest and open , nice read thanks
I think your mistaken about going straight to vista. Most business’s are not using Vista. Further, as for drivers for x64 there is pretty much every thing already done.
As for stopped dev on x64, well since windows server 2008 x64 is the same model, i dont think its going away anytime soon.
And it’s always interesting to read how professional business users demanded MS not make server 2008 vista’ish.
We had more issues with XP64 than Vista64. All of our computers are using Vista64, without problems. I think it’s good idea to go for Vista.
But we also use WinRar, and it IS in the right click menu. It works. Total Commander (32bit) doesn’t handle TortoiseSVN(64 bit)
I agree with going straight to Vista 64. Besides quicktime and codec problems, it runs very stable and fast. No issues at all.
For 3D/OGL apps I’d recommend disabling Aero and use Vista Basic until dirvers/applications support it.
Thanks a lot for your insights Luc-Eric!
As for Winrar: I can highly recommend 7zip instead, it does rar, zip etc. but also the very efficient 7zip compression, that gives the highest compression rate I have seen so far when set to “ULTRA”. It is open source and free and comes in a 64 Bit version as well as 32 :-)
http://www.7-zip.org/
As for Visual Studio Express 2008:
Microsoft does all it can to blur the fact that you CAN do 64 bit with it – it just isn’t very straightforward:
You have to download and install the latest Windows SDK (for Server 2008) that comes with 64Bit compilers, start the commandline that comes with it and set it to the environment you want (I used the x64 Crosscompiler), then you start Visual Studio Express 2008 from this commandline with the /useenv commandline option so the environment variables set by the SDK are used.
In my project I had to set the target machine to “x64″ for the linker, give the preprocessor a “X64″ instead of windows32 and add “/envx64″ to the MIDL Commands.
With that, I was able to compile my messiah:studio shaders for the new 64 Bit version without problems.
I haven’t tried MR yet, but since it is also C, it should be the same.
Maybe too tedious for serious developers, but perfect for the every now and then coder ;-)
Cheers and thanks,
Thomas
Hi,
one question about the speed, shouldn’t mental ray 64 be somewhat faster ?? also one thing that is much much needed is a complete multithreading of all the components of xsi… it’s really frustrating sometimes to see a geometric operator (or almost anything else) running on just 1 cpu when you have 4… eh..
my2cents
Oh yea,
vista NO python
vista NO quicktime
xp64 or server2008 x64 = quicktime YES, python YES.
Windows Server 2008 is based on Vista, and not Windows XP.
In fact Vista SP1 includes Server 2008 fixes, and puts the kernel version of Vista and Server 2008 in sync.
About picking Vista 64 instead of XP 64.. my point is that the third-party vendors do not care about making drivers for XP 64, as so few people use it, and those that do would be server users who do not need drivers for multi-media devices. Everyone’s focus is on support for Vista. Expect future 64-bit software as well to only support Vista, there are only a few thousand of XP64 users.
I believe the fact that XP 64 stopped development 4 years ago is very important, because back then 64-bit hardware wasn’t pervasive. 64-bit was one of the big big focus of Vista, it’s still fairly ‘beta’ in XP 2003.
Joe: I don’t know what you’re saying, but there is no Quicktime in XSI 64-bit on xp64 or server 2008, as there is no 64-bit SDK. The quicktime player and web browser plug-ins work fine in either XP or Vista, they are 32-bit.
Vista is a pig …. a slow, annoying pig (Are you SURE you want to do THAT!? – Are you SUPER sure!?).
How can Microsoft justify a bare *OS* that eats 800+MB RAM in it’s 64-bit flavor? I’ve helped about 15 people I know either uninstall it from a new machine they’ve bought, or, reinstall XP32 on a system that they made the mistake of “upgrading” to Vista.
I guess the lack of 64-bit Quicktime support (in XSI) hasn’t caused me any problems since I don’t usually render to a movie format – but Quicktime works everywhere else in XP64. There are a few utilities that I use that don’t run under XP64 – but not many – and most 32-bit apps run fine on it. The only driver I couldn’t find for my XP64 system was my printer driver – but it runs off of my server, so it works (but without some of the utilities that I have under XP32).
For my foreseeable future, I’ll be sticking to XP64 and XP32 – I prefer that my RAM and GPU get used for my renders and my applications – not to compensate for Microsoft’s craptastic coding and poor attempt at an OSX UI ripoff… (I know, I’m a troglodite…;)
I’m running both 64 and 32 bit Vista here. I have some issues with file copying but other than that no real problems. It’s certainly not ‘a pig’.
JoeW, learn how Vista manages the memory…
Kim apparently the SP1 fixes that file copy issues.
python?
Bullit – I understand “Superfetch” and “intelligent heuristic memory management” just fine – I just don’t believe that Microsoft does “intelligent and automatic” very well .. not to mention that I think that dropping OpenGL support in Vista was a bad idea…
About a year ago, Tom’s Hardware did a pretty in-depth analysis of Vista vs XP and in their conclusion noted that while Vista can feel faster and smoother than XP – it can lag behind dramatically in rendering and encoding tasks. You can read it here and draw your own conclusions: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/index.html
Admittedly, this review of Vista is almost a year old – so in light of that – does anyone have any useful comparison information between Vista and XP? Memory footprints, render times, load times, even simulation comparisons? All of my experience was with an early version of Vista – about the same time the Tom’s Hardware article was written – and at that time Vista seemed very sluggish and fraught with problems. Hard numbers generated on identical machines would speak volumes in this discussion.
JoeW, please check your facts before posting… Vista fully supports OpenGL
http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol003_9
Windows Vista doesn’t take 800 megs of RAM, it’s more somewhere about 300 and 400 megs. In the task manager, if you do a lot of file IO you can easily find as much as half of you RAM apearing to be used, but that’s all for disk caching and freed up as necessary. Vista tries to make use for caching of the memory that is normally left unused in XP, so the task manager is inaccurate with regards to actual free memory. I’ll certainly agree that it’s a little disconcerting, but on this speedy 64-bit multicore machine I just don’t care.
The 64-bit version of Windows (XP or Vista) takes more memory than the 32-bit version, in parts because it needs to load 32-bit and 64-bit components, and because 64-bit binaries are bigger. If you’re updating an existing machine, you take that into consideration. A 64-bit machine with just 2 or 4 gig of RAM is a little lame, better stick to XP in that case.
I can’t comment on the raw CPU speed of Vista compared to XP. My point of view is XP is dead and you can’t do anything about it, you have to accept Vista eventually. The question is when, and potentially how to deal with it. It doesn’t really matter if you’re already running XP64 now and happy, I’m not suggesting you should drop it before you need to.
With regards to OpenGL, this was mostly a misunderstanding that’s been spun. In Windows XP, Microsoft’s support for OpenGL was a software-only implementation, and a driver harness. In Vista, they’ve announced that it was going to be implemented on top of Direct3D. This meant that Microsoft’s software implementation of OpenGL– which no one uses except in cases like Remote Desktop — would be implemented with Direct3D (and therefore could potentially run faster).
Microsoft has never written shipped OpenGL drivers for any version Windows, so the drivers included with Vista did not really have a hardware OpenGL implementation. On XP, it’s the updated drivers from nVidia and ATI that implements OpenGL. Now, obviously if XSI runs on Vista with Aero, then vista supports OpenGL, or I’m totally hallucinating.. :P
300-400mb, thats insane.
My clean xp64 install when booted up and operational is 100mb in taskman. Thats 200-300 more for anything i need it for. Thats whats important.
Also there are truck loads of motherboards that do x64 but only upto 4gb.
And why I ask are you pushing vista so much? Maybe Avid is going to TPM?
visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgFbqSYdNK4 and find out…
PS winxp no tpm, vista tpm built in.
Just to note, I’m running WinXP 64 and I’m using WinRar in the windows explorer just fine.
Apple has an installer for Quicktime for Vista 64bit, but not for XP64. The only thing I use quicktime and XSI together for is doing screen captures for Pre-Vis. But the main issue is getting better support for all the other apps we use that rely on quicktime like After Effects. I’m using XP64 and QT 7.3 and it’s working ok. Every now and then I get a QT crash or AE freaks out.
Thanks for the insight Luc-Eric, discussions like this are very helpful.
as a note to other readers, there are two different “Joe” posters above. “Joe”, from Africa, and “JoeW”, from the US.
64bit XSI version, over Windows XP 64bit, how many RAM by single process may be paged?
I was have serious problems with Windows XP 32bit (over hardware with first generation of 32bit dual xeon and 4GB installed RAM), and RAM limit allocated by single process. Most applications, not only XSI, when up around 1.4-1.6GB RAM crashing without no error mensages. Theoretically 32bit of Windows (x86 archq.) limit is 2GB by single process paged.
I’m sceptic about Windows how to OS system for working seriously. 64bit version included.
I think which OSX is a powerful OS system, and Softimage should be to open mind and porting XSI.
Sincerely I don’t understand those “devotion” of Softimage for working single-direction, looking and making ties to Microsoft.
Unaided, this is discussed in the article. In windows 32-bit apps are limited to 2 gigabyte, to which you usually need to subtract the size of the RAM mapping required by hardware drivers including the graphic card (which is not an issue specific to Windows).
This 2 gig split can be raised to 3 gig with the /3G switched noted in the article. It’s 4 gig for 32-bit apps running under Windows 64-bit.
Of course 64-bit applications on 64-bit windows do not have this limitation : there would be no point in 64-bit apps if it did.
You are wrong about Microsoft not supporting Windows XP 64-bit.
Windows XP 64 bit runs on the Windows 2003 Server Kernel updated and released with the OS in 2005. It had Service Pack 1 which was released 6 months after XP 32 bit SP2 and it literally crushed it. In March, 2007 Service Pack 2 was released for Windows XP pro 64 bit and Windows Server 2003 64-bit so many issues have been addressed.
Please note, that only Core 2 Duo/Quad or Phenom users should try the 64-bit OS. The reason is that AMD claimed that the Athlon 64 was 64 bit native, but the fact it ran Extentions to support 64 bit programs in a time when 64 bit hardware didn’t exist proves that it was not 64 bit. If the Processor was truly 64 bit native, then it would not have needed extentions to execute 64 bit code…it simply would have been native and execute throughout…but instead it needed to extend the instruction set with special instructions shall it encouter 64 bit programs….The A64s perform better in a 32-bit environment but have the capabilities to run 64 bit code.
The Core 2 Duos and Quads are 64 bit native processors that actually enter “32-bit Execution Mode” when a 32 bit program is loaded and detected. This is nice that it has backwards compatability, but also….one loses half the registers per core and that is a big problem when it comes to performance because we buy processors for those registers….
When running Windows 64-bit on C2Ds and C2Qs, one deals with double the width of information and full access and use of all the processor registers which is a good thing. Also many 64-bit native drivers that are good along with native 64-bit programs exist now. There is a 64-bit Native version of firefox out there, though I wish 64-bit Opera existed for Windows 64 bit.
Game Performance Wise……I had on 32 bit windows around 20 – 30FPS on max settings on my favorite UT III map…My framerate with the updated drivers and the 64 bit OS never went under 51 FPS on the same map. This is attributed to the fact the Kernel on windows xp pro 32-bit came from a conceptual design in 1998 which became the windows 2000 kernel. The same Kernel was used in Windows XP and Multicore processors can be detected in the way of threading execution, but XP itself will not use the Registers of any core outside Core 0 and cache memory gets copied over time and time again. My Oblivion framerate went up by 12 – 14 in most outdoor locations, because the OS can make better use of the processor.
The reason why Vista loses 20% – 30% performance in a game vs XP is because Aero and the Desktop count as a heavy program and when you are running a game, you already Vista’s Graphical User Interface which takes lots of memory and some processing power loaded into Video Memory.
I trust the Kernel of Windows XP Pro 64-bit since it was a SERVER KERNEL which means that better networking will exist considering the target of XP Server 2003 originally were global corporations of all kinds. I don’t trust the Kernel to any version of VISTA because it was MADE to target consumers and attack piracy and other things to increase their profits. Vista also has a lot of bloatware running…to the point I’ve decided to skip Direct X 10 altogether and go on to Direct X 11 when a new Microsoft Operating System is released that goes to 64 bits.
I hope my post was useful. I spend hours reading the Intel Documentation. I did not write about the Phenom processor because although I know its architecture, I do not own one and thus it would be unfair to be a scientist and speculate about performance I have not seen with my own eyes….but have read about the TLB errors which existed there.
If you need help in Setting up Windows XP 64-bit and what kind of hardware and drivers are optimal, Setsunayaki is my AIM name. Good luck everyone.
Softimage XSI should be ported to MAC! end of story. Look at Houdini/ SideFX. they are doing the right thing.
Microsoft is an infected environment, slowing us all down.
Microsoft’s whole concept is ridiculous! WAKE UP PEOPLE!. I mean Microsoft’s whole concept now is fighting Virus to have a healthy system. That goes against all logic. A OS that can’t tackle it’s own survival is not a OS id put my money on.