I've read about people whom are experiencing problems with Houdini under both 64-bit Linux and Windows XP.

I myself am a proud owner of an AMD Athlon64 X2 (dual core), though running under 32-bit Windows XP. My system being dual core with a nice clockrate and a great videocard it's already very fast, especially compared to my previous system.

What are the benefits of AMD Athlon64 (X2) processors under 32-bit Windows XP - or Linux for that matter - when running Houdini compared to 32-bit architectures? (Let's say speed-wise, aside the issues people may be experiencing currently). Because I wonder if there will be a major benefit if I switch over to 64-bit Windows XP.


Thanks in advance!

I'm not aware of any serious troubles under 64 bit Linux, apart from graphics driver issues some people have had - and often that's traced back to the card which will often have trouble under 32 bit also. I'm running 64 bit drivers, with a decent card(FX3600), and with driver 1.0-7676 I'm absolutely stable - not had a single crash for the several months I've been running that config. Now there have been some issue with Houdini and dual core - not sure on the status of that. Can't speak for 64 bit Windows except I would expect more problems with that simply because Linux has been doing 64 bit longer. It's typically about the state of the drivers.

Anyway, there's a lot of misconceptions about 32 vs 64 bit out there - mostly that end users assume double the speed or something. All 64 bit gets you is the ability to address more memory and the ability to move data around internally faster. Now, I'm not belittling that latter issue - it can be highly relevant when doing high memory operations like compositing or anything that has to shuffle a *lot* of data around. However, if you render a typical scene in 32 and 64, you won't notice a difference. Cooking complex networks might be slightly faster - a lot faster if it's a more brain dead network that merely has to massage massive amounts of data. It's the data moving that's related to speed.

64 bit will be great once the drivers get more stabilized, but really all it gets most users right now are bragging rights. Some that push *really* hard might notice a difference.

Cheers,

J.C.

I’m running Houdini 8 on XP x64 with an Athlon 4200+ and 2 gig ram. I am having no problems.

I had both a 32 bit install and 64 bit install but abandoned the 32 bit partition, as all programs responded much more quickly when run under the 64 bit OS. Render times are about the same but the over all responsiveness of the system is much better with x64.

Hope this helps

Dave