User Poll: Do you need Windows or Mac 32-bit?

We are looking at deprecating support for 32-bit Windows and Mac apps, as we did last year on Linux. This would allow us to spend those resources on features that would benefit more users.

Please let us know if you still use Windows or Mac 32-bit. If you do, how critical is it that that support remain in future OptiX versions?

We look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks,
DaveMc
OptiX R&D Manager

We have discussed this briefly and we don’t see any real reason to need 32bit anymore. Any system we have that is running 32bit is probably not powerful enough to do much with OptiX anyhow and can always be upgraded to 64bit.

We are now evaluating OptiX to see if it is suitable for our dental CAD application.
One model of our scanners are running over 32bit machine. That makes us need to maintain our applications both on 32bit and 64bit. For desktop, 64bit is majority.

We compile to 32-bit using Visual Studio, but code and run on 64-bit Windows. Will this have an impact?

Up for visibility, we’re interested in this.

Marknv, interested in what specifically?

Users opinions :)

I think that support for Mac OS 32 bits if necessary since apple itself, as far as I know, does not have 32 bit version of it operating systems, however I’m a macbook user and I never use any apple workstation.

On the other hand, I think that it isn’t rare to find some machine running a 32 bits version of Windows. I use a 32bits machine in my work running windows.

In my current project using OptiX I chose to use a 32bits version because I have other libs that I have to build a 64bits myself since there is no binary package available (of course, this was a convenience for me but I’m talking about Qt here).

Since this was asked in a public forum, my opinion is that support for Windows shoudn’t be removed as well CUDA 32 bits support. On the other hand, I’m a single user working in a personal project.

OSX has had support for 64 bit apps starting in 10.5 (if I recall correctly), though it was harder to get 64 bits apps to run in 10.5 (I think you could only run 64 bit console apps). In 10.6 you could run apps in 64 bits, though whether the 64 bit kernel was used by default depended on the machine (http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3770). I believe starting in 10.6 it would also compile 64 bits by default. The OptiX developers who use OSX mostly use the 64 bit version (since this is the default compilation mode).

I never fully understood why the Qt team still relies on 32 bit libraries for deployment and if you want 64 bit ones you have to compile them by yourself (and compiling them sometimes isn’t trivial and requires a lot of time due to all metaprogramming stuff they use, it almost take as much time as compiling a linux kernel) but they should make 64 bit libraries for Windows available soon. For performance and computing-intensive applications, 64 bit is the default choice.