Maya on Windows 64-bit systems

Benefits of 64-bit Maya

With Maya 2009 for 64-bit EM64T/AMD^{^®} 64 processors, you can now work with larger and more complex scenes than you ever could before.

Maya on 64-bit can take advantage of greater than 4GB of memory (maximum memory is system-dependent)
Maya on 64-bit uses SSE2 instructions for floating point computations
Additional general registers in 64bit mode allow the compiler to generate better code which spills to memory less often.

Supported features

The following table lists features that are not supported in 64-bit Maya.

Feature	Comments
Vector Renderer plug-in	Not supported in 64-bit Maya (3rd party library). Not supported on Linux.
QuickTime VR	Not supported in 64-bit Maya (3rd party library) Not supported on Linux.
RibExport	Not supported in 64-bit Maya.
Alias wirefile export	openModel9.7 is not available in 64-bit Maya.
Maya Motion Capture feature	Not supported in 64-bit Maya. We recommend using Autodesk MotionBuilder for motion capture.

Microsoft Runtime Libraries

The Maya 64-bit installer puts the Microsoft runtime libraries into the System directory C:\Windows\WinSxS using the Microsoft redistributable Merge Modules.

NoteYou may not have these specific runtime libraries installed on your machine, so part of the Maya installation is to install the files that Autodesk Maya needs. These are the Microsoft runtime libraries for C library, MFC (Microsoft Foundation Class), the user interface framework, and the OpenMP runtime library. They are required libraries to run Maya as a MFC graphical user interface application.

These are system dynamic libraries and are shared with all applications on the machine. As Microsoft updates the 64-bit operating system, they may update these libraries.

With the current Microsoft compiler for 64-bit systems (VC8), the system no longer searches the PATH variable for the runtime libraries. For Maya 64-bit, Autodesk is using the system copies. With Microsoft’s versioning of the manifest files, Maya should find the proper DLL files.

Maya API and Developer Kit

For details on API and Developer support for 64-bit Maya, see the API guide under Developer Resources in the Maya Help.