making visuals with technology

As you probably heard by now, Blender 2.5 Alpha 0 is scheduled to be released sometime tomorrow. Meanwhile, there are already ‘unofficial’ builds popping up all over the place. My contribution towards this Blender 2.5 frenzy is a 64bit Windows Build of Blender 2.5 Alpha 0, made with Visual Studio 2008.

Edit:

Alpha 0 is officially out! I also made a x64 optimized build for Windows with the insanely fast Intel C++ Compiler.  It took me a while because as oppose to just turning on every single optimization flag, I took the time to profile the binary.

Profiling is another way to increase performance by optimizing the binary for ‘realworld use’.  See, when a compiler links all the source files, it has no idea which ones will really get used, and in what order.  So to train the compiler to be smarter about this, I first ran a instrumentation build of Blender through a couple of real world rendering tests, after a few hours of normal use, I got a performance database of how Blender actually gets used.  I then rebuilt Blender with this performance database as a guide, generating an optimized build that takes into account function call orders, data layout, etc…  Thanks to this awareness, the compiler can intelligently re-order the Bleneder binary so that all the related stuff goes together, so in a way, a profiled build of Blender can almost anticipate what you are going to do before you do it :D

Enjoy.