MadCap Software Forums

Does Flare 7 take advantage of 64 bit processors/windows 7 (64-bit)? The hardware requirements say that it supports 64-bit but that is slightly vague. I have experienced some lag while writing in Flare and using Capture. I also have outlook and a few tabbed webpages open. I am wondering if upgrading from a 32-bit to a 64-bit processor would make a significant difference? (I need to justify it to the IT department )

I've been using Flare 7 and a 64-bit Windows 7 machine. Not having any issues, and compile times seem a lot faster.

I use Flare 7 on a core i7 64bit windows machine with 8GB of ram. It is definitely using multiple cores and more than 3gig of Ram during builds. The xml editor is no more faster or less buggy on 64bit windows, so day-to-day writing is about the same.

Here are some rough build times using my two machines on a 2000 page PDF build:
32bit Win 7, 2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo w/2GB Ram : 1 hour 10 minutes.
64bit Win 7, 2.0Ghz 2nd Generation Core i7 w/8GB Ram: 35 minutes.

YMMV

The advantages that Flare has under 64 bit will come exclusively from the 64bit .NET runtime. There isn't anything special in Flare that intentionally makes a difference between 32 bit and 64 bit. Same applies to multicore usage as in parallel processing, there is nothing in Flare that makes use of that. What you will see is that the OS distributes threads across multiple cores/processors, so having a multicore CPU will bring performance improvements, but those are not programmed into Flare, just come with the territory.
If you are up for a hardware refresh getting anything below a dual core 64 bit CPU based system is just silly (or cheap). While quad-core is nice I'd rather see that you get more RAM and a very fast hard drive (or even SSD) instead. That will benefit Flare more than a bunch of cores jockeying for a little RAM.