Hi guys!
I consider to upgrade my system to Windows Vista. Is there any version of 64 bit Z Brush for Windows Vista available? I couldn’t find any mention about this on pixologic site.
Thank you!
V
None, afaik. 32-bit all the way around. It neither seems to limit people’s creativity, nor does it keep ZB from working just fine in Vista64 though. Guess 64-bit is one thing we can hope for in the eventual v3.5.
Thank you for reply, Cooke,
I just thought there would be more available RAM for one particular application in 64 bit system. In 32 bit Windows you can’t use more than 2Gb RAM for Zbrush, even if you have much more RAM in your comp.
V
ZBrush is large address aware. This means that it can use up to 4 GB of your system’s RAM. So it does beat the 32-bit limitation of 2 GB.
Yep. Plus the way in which RAM is handled is still different thanks to the fundamental difference between 64-bit VS 32-bit address spacing.
In a 32-bit OS, all RAM addresses come from the same pool - even video RAM and BIOS reserved. So, if you have 4GB of RAM on your system, the OS has automatically got access to far less thanks to preliminary overhead. That’s why a 32-bit OS with 4GB of RAM generally reads 3GB-3.25GB. So, if you’ve got a whopping 2GB of RAM sucked up by Vista overhead, you’ve only got 1GB-1.25GB to play with for apps. In a 64-bit OS, with more potential address from which to allocate memory, you get back that extra bit of RAM that’s lost to hardware overhead under a 32-bit OS. That’s minor on a system with 12GB of RAM, but not so minor on a system with 3GB or 4GB.
Just got ZB setup on a i7 920 6GB RAM Vista64 system, and it is sweet, but I’m still trying to find out more about memory issues to make certain my system is the best it can be for ZB and PS.
What has been said here and elsewhere about Vista being a resource hog is really not fair to Vista. In fact, all the whining on the net about Vista led me to believe I was going out on a limb with it, but it has turned out to be incredibly awesome and problem-free experience. OK, UAC is a tad naggy, but if I tire of it, I’ll turn it down or off.
I believe it defaults to using SuperFetch, which is a system that tries to pre-load the most used apps in RAM. Think about it. If I have 6 GB, and it tries to pre-load a large percentage of that with various apps I ‘might’ use, it is possibly not much different from opening up an app by clicking on a 3GB file, in terms of the activities being performed. For a bit after startup, the harddrive will thrash, multiple cores will churn, and it will appear that Vista, all by itself, is using most of my memory. But the truth is that I have two to four times as much memory available to me and my apps now than I had under old XP32. That said, I must admit that I never see Vista64 go above 19-25% of my RAM with just a browser or so open. Unless I’m misreading things, that’s only 1.5GB, which doesn’t sound like a resource hog to me, considering it is less than the base chunk of memory that XP32 grabs right off the bat with only 3.5GB physical RAM available to it. However, what I may be seeing over the first week of operation is that SuperFetch is just analyzing my activities, and slowly adding things to its list of stuff to pre-cache, therefore I started at about 18% with just a browser open, but now I’m at 25% with just a browser open. On the other hand, it may be an indicator of the fact that I’m slowly loading up my system with apps such as a virus scanner, soundcard driver and helper app, mouse helper app, video card helper app, Steam, and all the other crust that accumulates in the system tray or the system processes list.
If I had a 512MB Video card, and 4GB RAM under XP 32, which I did, then chances were that I had, at most, 1.75 GB available for ZB, due to XP taking half of the available RAM. At best, XP would only give a MAX of 2GB anyway, IF I wasn’t also running PS, IE and/or FireFox, with Pandora running in one of the tabs, 512MB Video memory, etc. With all that other stuff going, I’d be lucky to have a single GB left over for ZB. This jibes very closely with the experiences I have with SolidWorks on my XP32 system at work. SW tends to have an out of memory error at about 800-900 MB. Now I have, closer to a full 4GB available for ZB. That is really sweet.
Now I’m just trying to figure out the best tweaks or add-ons for my system to optimize it for either ZB or PS CS4. Since I believe that CS4 has been updated to handle much more RAM on a 64-bit system, the best thing for it is probably forget about setting up something especially tricky for the scratchdisk and just give it more RAM on a Vista64 system. But since ZB memory addressing caps at 4GB, I’m wondering what is the absolute best solution for it? Does it do any tricks past 4GB, or is that an absolute hard limit? Is mem compression an indicator that ZB has run out of memory short of its 4GB limit, or is it a trick to pack more polys into a smaller box. If the mem compression it is doing is a trick to squeeze more polys into the 4GB box, then what things might be done to improve behavior when it begins the mem compression/mem reading cycles? For example, I divided a tool to the 30 million poly range, and it worked fine, but the compression/read cycles take up about 95% of the time spent working on the model.