Jessica Lyon who is the project manager of the popular Firestorm viewer has announced in a new blog post this week that there will be 64-bit support for Windows 64-bit, Linux 64-bit and at some point in the future possibly a Mac 64-bit version of Firestorm. This is very good news and it’s been welcomed by Second Life community/Firestorm users.
Using 64-bit version of Firestorm would firstly work a little bit faster and secondly it would work more effectively than using a 32-bit version. 64-bit will use a greater amount of memory but overall it will still perform well.
Before 2014 there will be regular releases of ALPHA and experimental versions of Firestorm which is worth watching out for and trying out. There will be a Firestorm Public Beta release coming out soon full of fixes and improvements. Jessica mentions Materials, DAE Export with other things are in the works.
What are your views on having 64-bit versions of Firestorm ?
Daniel Voyager 
Definately going to be watching this with great interest.
BTW: when you said it would “use more memory” did you mean “it would require more memory in order to run”, or did you mean “it would be able to use a greater amount of memory” ?
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Thanks, Zauber. Yeah I’m following this with interest and hopefully the release will come this month.
I mean for 64-bit “it would be able to use a greater amount of memory”.
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Actually, both are true. In 32-bit mode, a pointer is 32 bits. In 64-bit mode, they’re 64 bits. It takes more space to save the bigger registers on the stack for function calls, too.
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Thanks Melissa
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I used a windows 64b version of Niran’s old viewer for more then a year!
at least 12 giga ram is needed to run it but it did fly!
Now i use UKando that is a 32b version only and to be honest i don’t see any major decrease in performance (But this viewer is plain LL latest code with a few useful add ons, the prefect choice for any that wishes to use a v3 viewer style!), while Niran was at the time the edge of the ultimate graphics experiment any could use!
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Thank you, zzpearlbottom for the comment. 🙂
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I think it’s great–especially as a Linux user. It will save all sorts of hoohah and having to install libraries to let 32-bit programs run on a 64-bit kernel. Nowadays you have to go out of your way to find a 32-bit x86 system–and, for example, the folks at Canonical say that unless you have some reason not to, if you have a 64-bit processor, run a 64-bit kernel. Not having a version of the viewer that just works will drive people away, and that’s the last thing SL needs now.
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Thanks Melissa 🙂
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