These 64-bit threads always seem to head in more or less the same direction— here's what I've gleaned from this one so far. People want the SketchUp team to work on:
performance improvements for all users: Users should be able to load, save, operate upon (ex: "explode") and render at interactive frame rates models with (some big number that gets bigger every time we increase overall system performance) of polygons.
Everyone always benefits from improvement to SketchUp's performance. The reality (for all software systems, not just SketchUp) is that performance is always bottlenecked somewhere. We're always working on removing the 'next' bottleneck in line. The 'last' bottleneck we worked on was rendering performance for large models— SU8 has an entirely new rendering pipeline. 'Merge' operations (implicated in 'ungroup', 'explode', 'import' &etc.) are a reasonable 'next' bottleneck to work on, though there are other
"64-bit" as a technology, however, really offers no panacea for performance in SketchUp. Specifically:
- **64-bit modeling operations don't execute faster than 32-bit ones.**Look to faster CPUs for improvement to execution speed for core modeling operations. A single fast processor core.
- 64-bit computing does not improve realtime rendering performance. Look to faster GPUs for improvement to realtime rendering performance. Lighter models will always render raster than heavy ones.
- 64-bit computing does not improve file open/save performance. Look to faster disk I/O (as with SSDs) for improvement to disk-access operations. Larger files will always be slower to open than smaller ones.
- 64-bit computing does not improve software reliability. 64-bit operations are just as likely to crash as 32-bit ones. Submit crash reports when you can— that's the only way we can know what went wrong.
- 64-bit computing can address more memory, but SketchUp modeling operations are not bottlenecked by memory. Models of 1-2m polygons still fit neatly within 32-bits worth of memory.
improvements for developers: Rendering engines (mainly, V-Ray; to a lesser degree, Maxwell) should be able to execute 'inside SketchUp' in a 64-bit environment, rather than running their rendering in their own thread.
3rd-party rendering engines are free to execute operations in 64-bit environments if they design their architecture to do so. Many of them have done so today— there are significant architectural advantages to doing so. Some renderers, like Maxwell, market the ability to execute in a 64-bit environment (as well as the ability to do things like distributed network rendering) as an advanced feature that justifies purchasing their "Maxwell Studio" rendering suite.
Oddly, perhaps, the single strongest argument for a 64-bit "version" of SketchUp hasn't really come up in this thread yet. Developers who implement .skp import|export in their applications using our freely-licensed SDK will benefit from 64-bit builds of our precompiled libraries when they begin shipping 64-bit builds of their applications. They don't strictly speaking need them, but it would simplify matters greatly if they could have them.
john
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