This question may seem rather obvious to those of you who work with the Blender source code, however I myself am not a coder (my animation could also be better, but that’s a seperate issue ) and I think this is something that might just be a problem.
The current version of osX (10.4.8) only has 64-bit support for the unix features of the os; however, with the release of Leopard (10.5), 64-bit support will spread to the rest of the os, including application support. Maybe I’m just naive and Blender is already running on 64-bit on osX, but I really don’t know these things. Basically what I’m asking is, how is Blender going to run on Leopard? Will it be faster, slower, or even work at all?
It’ll work just fine. To take advantage of 64-bit will probably need a recompile but 64-bit OSs are backwards compatible with 32-bit apps. You probably won’t notice much difference in performance at all. For most people, the binaries will run a little slower because 64-bit has some overhead. The only real benefit you get is that in practical terms you don’t have the 4GB Ram limitation assovciated with 32-bit machines. This is good news for people who have Mac Pros with 16GB Ram for example and who work with high resolution textures and scenes. For 99% of the population, it won’t matter at all.
) and I think this is something that might just be a problem.