Using Blender from blender.org vs. Blender from Steam

Hi folks. I’m thinking about moving to Steam OS and using Blender from there, but I’m just wondering if using older .blend files created in a 64 bit version of Blender downloaded from blender.org will render identically to (what I assume will be a 32 bit version of) Blender installed in Steam? Like I’m assuming there may be some minor differences deep down in the bowels of Blender (given the reduced word legth) that may get multiplied as they work their way up through the call stack and arrive as the rendered output.

I’ll be rendering on more than one machine, so I need uniform output. Does anyone know if my assumption that Steam uses the 32 bit version of Blender is even correct?

32 bit system max ram is 4gb. As far as I understand it a 32 bit programm cannot use more then 4gb ram.
If they adivse you to have at least 8gb, then it should be a 64 bit version.

Oh, you could just test it:
Use a scene which needs more than 4gb ram!

Using up 4 GB of memory is quite a hard thing to do. An easier option is to open the Python console and copy-paste these two lines:

import sys
sys.maxsize

The second line results either in 2147483647, which means a 32-bit build, or in 9223372036854775807, which means 64 bits.

Avesome. Thanks folks. I pasted


import sys
sys.maxsize

Into the Python interpreter of Blender installed via Steam and it gave me 2[SUP]64-1[/SUP]. That’s brilliant news. Now I know I can start getting ready tomake the move away from Windows again and getting my RAM upgradeded.

Mhm, by the way… I was quite surprised that the value is 2[SUP]63[/SUP]-1 = 922(…)807. It is the maximum value of a signed 64bit integer, instead of the classical 2[SUP]64[/SUP]-1 = 184(…)615 for an unsigned size_t. The reason is that Python often negative integers internally for array indices, and computers don’t really have support for 64bit addresses anyway, so it doesn’t do any harm.