Ok so I work in the oil and gas industry and we deal with engineering PDMS (CAD) models. Currently I have a method for getting CAD PDMS models into FBX models with no hassle. The problem is one little piece of the overall model is about 1.5Gb (fbx model). I call these 1.5Gb chunks “Modules” Now, combine about 15 of those and you have a complete 3d model. My system can handle the stress of loading them no problem.
Oh right my setup…
vista 64 (can’t change this even if i wanted to)
48Gb triple channel RAM
dual 480GTX cards
dual Xeon processors (12 cores total)
2Tb of drives.
Lots of power here to render these things out in software like Navisworks, Solidworks, Maya, ect.
So what is the problem? Unity is x32 meaning I can’t use the 48Gb of RAM to load these massive models. Meaning my virtual environment for training that I built in Unity is useless.
So, what is the plan for Unity64? Because I need it…
Sounds very demanding!
My main issue is my levels fill up too much memory (almost 3 GB each)
so that can be a problem and also running Beast and Umbra then cause Unity to go too high in memory usage to finish.
I’m sure I need to know much more about optimizing.
As my avatar says, “waiting for 64”.
beast / umbra run in own processes, so even if unity uses 4GB it does not affect them unless you don’t happen to have 16GB ram to have 4GB free so beast / umbra can go all out on 4GB too
Yes, they run on their own processes but still it’s Unity that crashes with an out of memory error,
running nothing but Unity 2.9 GB and Umbra or Beast (which ever process I am running at the time, not both)
using no more than 1.5 GB on a 8 GB system. So there is enough memory.
Game engines don’t need to but editors that let you create the levels and bake pvs and lightmaps definitely need to be up to 64bit nowadays. You can’t manage a 20gb project with an application that axes out at 3.3gb ram usage when already the texturs in your level are larger thus killing beast …
Unity is, aside of Torque, the only “known” engine I am aware of not offering 64bit support for the editor.
But they are reviewing the feature request on the feedback.unity3d.com system already so there is hope, as the bug reports from unity crashes due to pvs - beast generation are not helpfull and drive away all professional devs as they are aware that pvs is impossible to use in a larger scale project right now cause pvs must be in the main scene, you can not stream it in through streamed levels for example, so you can not split the work to avoid the memory limitation death
I’m sitting on a “simple” core i7 920 power user machine with 18GB RAM and wouldn’t mind if unity were able to use the cpu and RAM meaningfull for pvs generation instead of just 2 cores and 3gb ram
I agree that 64bit on the client / player makes far less sense though.
wow what a beast machine :), you are lucky you can load these 1.5 Gb, mine even cann’t load 300 mb fbx properly, at 40% unity just crash, cmon let’s spam the 64 bit feedback :p.
32bit dev environments are a bottleneck. Even if you don’t think you need it, you’d be glad of having it when you do.
zBrush is the same, which is insane for an application where memory is a prime resource.
I’m running my PC stuff on an i7 x980 with 24GB, and it makes a vast difference in the apps that support it. I’d use my teeth and grow claws if you tried to drag me back to 32bit-everything.
Don’t get your hopes up too far though. Look at how long it took Adobe to make the switch…and you still have to use 32bit Photoshop for video stuff. Compatibility is a big deal.
