It's almost new computer time for me.

I've been looking at a lot of things out and about and I am thinking about stepping up to a 64bit AMD rig.

Now my question is this...Is anyone out there using Bryce on a 64bit machine? How is the performance? Does it render faster?

Anything anyone could tell me about this would be a great help.

Thanks

Requiem "...angels fall from grace, and sometimes heroes die."
Tunnelrunners --The Complete Archive

I have an AMD 64 3000+ processor and a gig of ram in my system and have no problems what-so-ever. Bryce is not yet 64 bit compatible. However, the 64 bit processor emulates 32 bit processing so there is not any problems running 32 bit applications with the 64 bit processor. You should have no problems at all if you put a 64 bit processor in your system. The only problem would be more processing power.... if you were to consider that a problem. 8) In my opinion... it is a wise choice.

There are 10 kinds of people: Those who know binary, and those who don't. 

A whiner is about as useful as a one-legged man at an arse kicking contest.

I've read about the 64bit systems (www.tomshardware.com, www.extremetech.com, www.arstechnica.com) a lot and generally they are a bit faster but not much. Unfortunately, to get the true benefit one needs 2 things, a recompiled application (i.e. bryce) and a 64bit OS (new version of Windows XP) Unfortunately, Bryce isn't 64 bit and the 64 bit XP isn't readily available in the stores and you have to do a complete reinstall to get a 32 bit xp into a 64. To make matters worse, most 'old' peripherals don't have drivers for 64 bit XP. This means you may have things like digital cameras, scanners, printers, lan cards, etc. that may not work. Can you stick with a 32 bit XP or Win2K and go with a 64bit Athlon, sure. I am not sure if there is a big advantage, but if you are building new it may work out well if you get a dual core chip. I recommend building your own system if you are up to it. Its a bit more annoying at times and you may have some problems, but not having to worry about having a no-name brand cd burner, motherboard of unknown origin, etc. is nice. You know which manufacturers to go to for drivers and firmware.

My PC is an AMD Athlon 3200+ 64-bit I couldn't tell you if it is running faster as I would have needed to go from a 3200+ 32-bit cpu to a 3200+ 64 bit cpu. (My old PC is an AMD Athlon 1800+ 32-bit) As Hartwichr states, you actually need a 64-bit OS and have the program in question be optimized for 64-bit to be able to gain anything from the extra instructions. BUT, imho...it can't hurt at all to have a 64-bit cpu, as that is the direction everything is headed in.

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I think the coolest thing would be if Daz were to make the next Bryce version use both multiple processors and video cards for rendering, to disk or screen, preferably either. I've read articles talking about the massive computational capability of some video cards relative to rendering and one has to assume that just adding in the functionality into your system to utilize the video card for rendering would probably add a lot of horsepower to our systems. One benefit potentially of a dual core system is even if Bryce favors the 'first' core (assuming that Windows sees the system as 2 cores versus 1 combined) you could set other applications to use the 2nd core. Imagine having Windows and your other apps pushing CPU chores onto #2 freeing up cycles for Bryce on #1. All speculation of course.

I've been thinking of the dual core scenario for a while. Currently, I'm running a HP zd7000 3.06 P4 machine with a gig of RAM. I have one of the first workig Hyper Thread processors and one of the things that I have been hoping for is that Bryce eventually gets multiple processor/video card render support. (Oh course, I am also hoping that they switch Rendering engines over to the 3Delight setup, but that may be too much to ask.) My big problem is that I haven't really been keeping track of stuff hardware wise over the last coouple of years...things have started to shift enough that I am having a rotten time keeping track of stuff. Unfortunately, the requirements for our form of artwork is a bit different than most people need for their home computers.

Requiem "...angels fall from grace, and sometimes heroes die."
Tunnelrunners --The Complete Archive