Is there going to have Corel X4 in 64 Bits?
I think the problem with drivers on 64 bit OS is a bit overrated. Yes, the old PCs with old hardware would probably have a problem. But I don't think any modern device would have no 64 bit drivers. I'm running 64 bit OS at work and at home and have no issues with any hardware I have. On XP x64 I did have problem with my old video capture card. I did keep a 32 bit OS for that rare occasion I needed to use it. However after upgrading to Vista x64 even that was taken care of since Vista recognized that piece of... <hardware>.
And don't forget that on x64 CPU there are twice as many general purpose registers and twice as many XMM registers, which means more data can be kept in registers and out of memory which significantly boosts performance. Also x64 CPU all have at least SSE2 instructions. Moving to x64 platform means that SSE2 (at least) will be guaranteed to be there. This could be a big performnce improvement.
And having more than 2GB or RAM available to application is a good enough reason to switch to 64 bit platform. x64 also provides a different (much faster) way of exception handling, so entering/exiting try...catch block will have no impact on performance.
Now, having said that, CorelDRAW is a huge application with a lot of code which has been written long time ago. Making everything compile and work on 64 bit platform would be a significant effort and will take away from developing new features. Is there a market demand to stall development and focus on porting the application to 64 bit platform? Would you buy x64 version of CorelDRAW which has no new features since last release (x86) yet pay the full upgrade price? Most people wouldn't.
I would personally LOVE to see as many native x64 applications on the market as possible as I'm 64 bit freak myself. (By the way, I'm happy to see 64 bit shell extension in CorelDRAW X4). And I would love to have something like Flash plugin for my x64 IE browser but "for some reason" Adobe is not releasing one... I wonder why :)
The background issue here is driver signing being mandatory for 64bits. Here are a few reading that will give you something to think about...
The thrid part in the below is well worth the time...
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2007/02/VistaKernel/
What Peter Gutmann thinks of (part 3) Vista DRM
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
And in simple terms...
http://apcmag.com/3112/microsoft_cuts_another_feature_full_hd_playback_in_32bit_vista_goes
Does the X5 version be 64-bit? When the corel release version X5?
I doubt that Corel or any other vendor will bring out 64 bit products until 64 bit represents more than 0.05% of the market!
It's a real chicken or the egg problem. I suspect you're right; and on the flip side, with my recent build I didn't see myself switching to a 64-bit os when all my heavy-lifting software is still coded to take advantage of only 32-bit. Why shoudl software support 64-bit when most are still running 32-bit, and why should most switch to 64-bit when it will take software two years to recode everything to take advantage, after everyone switches.
Adobe photoshop may provide the "bridge" though (sorry, pun intended) with it's 64-bit version to support a nice amount of memory for doing large large work...
32 bit OS will go extinc sooner than later...it's enevitable that the imgration from 32 - 64 will happne sooner...there is no need for 32 bits any longer, it would be a nice leap if they jsut by pass 64 and go to 128, 128bit cpus' oh yeah it will happen
You got it in one Steve it's Signed Drivers and DRM till the cows come home from 64bit on. It's all about protecting the integrity of the Digital Rights Management System and breaks with the whole concept that was Windows, a friendly OS with published methods and the ability of anyone to write a driver and apply it. You even need accreditation to make a card to slip in. It's the $500 Million Dollars MS put in to make Hollywood happy on HD-DVD.
The question is will they remove it or allow it to be bypassed?
Yani