So I’ve checked our twitter time line this morning and came across this nice little line:
@willoxh tweeted that there is a new version of qgis which enables to work with qgis in 64bit mode. For the record: Enabling a programm to work as 64bit version means you increase the possible amount of information in each calculation step as you can adress more memory per calculation step. Additionally you can hold more information in your program. Best example is probably the amount of satellite data you have in your project. Running QGIS in 32bit mode means the program can only use approx. 2Gbyte at maximum on Windows machines. Switching over to 64bit you will increase this amount to be 4Gb per process. So you will have more possibilities in analysis (like increasing the size of testdata in classification processes), project management and useability of data. In times of big data and ubiquitious data this is a big advantage and I hope the testing will not result in so many issues. Please support them in downloading QGIS 64bit for Windows, testing and submitting any issues to OSGEO.
Most interesting in this topic is the fact that ESRI announced the 64bit Geoprocessing capabilities just earlier this year for ArcGIS 10.1 but the main application 10.1 and 10.2 is still native 32bit… ESRI fans: come and explore the power of QGIS 😉 as probably ArcGIS 11 will have full 64bit support.
Reference: Faunaliagis @ WordPress
With a 32 bit application, you are limited to 2.5 GB of RAM on 32 bit windows OS, but can run up to 4 GB on 64 bit Windows OS. With a 64 bit application, you can run applications that take over 4 GB of RAM.
This has been the case on 64 bit Linux platforms with 64 bit versions of GRASS and QGIS for years. The excellent news is that the work is being done to bring the Windows versions up to the same level. Well done!