I was wondering what your plans are on updating Terragen to be 64-bit so more than 3 or 4GB of RAM can be allocated to the application. With CPU having more and more cores, more RAM will be needed to use Terragen with all the render threads. The current Mac Pros have 16 threads. If you allocate 400MB to each thread with the subdiv cache, this comes out to 6.4GB. The 32-bitness of Terragen limits this and will begin to become more of a bottleneck in render speed in the future. I know you've said it becomes less efficient with more than 4 render threads, especially on Mac OS, but that needs to be delt with. The next revision of Mac Pros will have two 6 core processors, with 24 threads. Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard is also coming out this year and Apple is urging all developers to convert all their applications to be 64-bit. I see that Terragen is using the Carbon framework which is probably why you haven't compiled the Mac version as a 64-bit application already. How difficult would it be to convert it to Cocoa since Apple doesn't plan on a 64-bit version of Carbon? I'm also willing to use Terragen on Windows since the render times are currently a bit faster for the Windows version. Would the Windows version of Terragen be easier to update to be a 64-bit application. I'm not as familiar with building programs for Windows. Thanks for the wonderful program and keep up the great work!
We all want a 64bit version of Terragen. Lots of the problems that people have are down to not having enough memory.
PS have said that they are working on a 64bit version and I believe it's pretty high on the priority list.
Hi,
The 64 bit conversion has already begun. The first step of that is actually getting the Mac version of the UI framework ported from Carbon to Cocoa. This is what I'm mainly working on now, and I have to say it's going much better than I'd anticipated. There's bound to be something tricky which crops up though, there always is :-). Once that is complete I'll make the UI framework 64 bit safe on Mac and Windows, and then we'll get stuck into making TG2 64 bit safe. No timeframe at this stage, but the conversion to 64 bit is certainly underway.
Regards,
Jo
Thanks for the news, Jo.
Quote from: jo on May 22, 2009, 11:27:47 PM
Hi,
The 64 bit conversion has already begun. The first step of that is actually getting the Mac version of the UI framework ported from Carbon to Cocoa. This is what I'm mainly working on now, and I have to say it's going much better than I'd anticipated. There's bound to be something tricky which crops up though, there always is :-). Once that is complete I'll make the UI framework 64 bit safe on Mac and Windows, and then we'll get stuck into making TG2 64 bit safe. No timeframe at this stage, but the conversion to 64 bit is certainly underway.
Regards,
Jo
Awesome! That's great to hear. I really look forward to it.
I agree, awesome news Jo! :)
Nice! I can't wait... ;) I have terragen 2 deep. Will there be an option, to get the Terragen 2 Deep 64bit, like an update???
Thanks :)
Terragen 2 64 bit will be a free update for registered users of TG2 when it becomes available.
- Oshyan
Planetside, did you get a Nehalem Mac Pro yet? If not, may I inquire to which Macintosh platform TG2 is being developed on?
Hi,
I don't have a new Mac Pro yet, hoping to get one in July. I was going to order one this month but something came up. I'm currently using a dual 2.7 GHz Power Mac G5 and a 1.83 GHz Core Duo Intel iMac.
Regards,
Jo
Paris (U.E.), le 02/06/2009
Bonjour
Quote from: jo on June 01, 2009, 04:48:04 AM
Hi,
I don't have a new Mac Pro yet, hoping to get one in July. I was going to order one this month but something came up. I'm currently using a dual 2.7 GHz Power Mac G5 and a 1.83 GHz Core Duo Intel iMac.
Regards,
Jo
Please be aware that 64 bits support in PPC is, IMHO, lacking. From my experience, math libraries, especially transcendentals, have precision problems. More precisely, using standard math libraries from C++ (as installed by default under MacOS X), transcendentals will only be computed with the accuracy of 32 bits long doubles. While this is admissible from a standards point of view, being in the realm of QoI, I do find it inappropriate for scientific work, and you may as well experience problems because of that. But then again, maybe in your case it does not matter...
Merci
Hubert Holin
Quote from: jo on June 01, 2009, 04:48:04 AM
Hi,
I don't have a new Mac Pro yet, hoping to get one in July. I was going to order one this month but something came up. I'm currently using a dual 2.7 GHz Power Mac G5 and a 1.83 GHz Core Duo Intel iMac.
Regards,
Jo
You really need some new computers so you can optimize stuff for current hardware, no offense. Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard will not even run on your G5 since it doesn't support PPC machines.