John Nack on Adobe As you've probably seen, among the great features in the
Lightroom 2.0 beta is its ability to run 64-bit-native on Mac (Intel, 10.5.x) and Windows (Vista 64). If you think it feels great to beat Aperture to the punch here, you're right. :-) What does 64-bit computing mean, practically speaking? In a nutshell, it lets an application address very large amounts of memory--specifically, more than 4 gigabytes. This is great for pro photographers with large collections of high-res images: Lightroom being able to address more RAM means less time swapping images into and out of memory during image processing-intensive operations. It's also important to say what 64-bit
doesn't mean. It doesn't make applications somehow run twice as fast. As Photoshop architect Scott Byer writes, "
64-bit applications don't magically get faster access to memory, or any of the other key things that would help most applications perform better." In our testing, when an app isn't using a large data set (one that would otherwise require memory swapping), the speedup due to running in 64-bit mode is around 8-12%.
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