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Hi folks,

A quickie.

I currently run 32Bit WIndows7 on a relatively new laptop with modest performance.

Being newly hooked on Madelbulb3D, I am seriously contemplating getting a much faster PC just for fractal progs.

Can Mandelbulb3D (and madelbulber/UltraFractal for that matter) run on 64Bit Windows7 and therefore make use of the extra available RAM to speed up rendering?

...Or would it run but be restricted to 4GB if it is optimised for 32Bit?

Thanks in advance.

related to this topic, does mandelbulber run under Ubuntu?

great, do know, or have you noticed if the 64bit version renders faster under Ubuntu?

Thanks for that. It clarifies things for me.

regards
kam

The 32-bit adress space is divided evenly into User-mode and Kernel-mode space, so there is a maximum of 2GB user space available under Windows for a single process. Notice that Microsoft impose weird artificial memory limits on Windows 7 versions, for instance, even on the 64-bit Windows 7 Starter edition, there is a 2GB limit: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

But anyway, none of this matters since Mandelbulb 3d doesn't use more than ~20MB of memory when running :-)

Well, actually I was wrong - I just assumed no memory was used beside the screen-buffer (that is the way I render in Fragmentarium), which is typically 3 bytes per pixel.

I just tried rendering different size images, and it seems M3D uses a lot of buffers, or more like 22 bytes per pixel (it probably stores depth, color, normals, and other things beyond my imagination).

Rendering a 7 MegaPixel image required 163MB with a peak at 273MB during post-processing on my machine, so for very large images (40-50MP?) you might run out of memory on a 32-bit machine. More memory won't change the speed, though (unless you run into disk swapping).