plans for supporting >3GB on 64-bit Vista?

[pcoveney@bioptigen.com]

Hello,

    Our company's product uses several NI cards, including the 6221, 1427/8/9, and 1410. Our software is a 32-bit .NET application using unmanaged VC++ code to call the NI-IMAQ and NI-DAQmx drivers through statically-linked libraries. Our workstations typically ship with 4GB of RAM installed, and reducing that number is not a realistic option for us.  Because our app collects and manages very large data sets, and because our customers are increasingly bumping up against the 2GB-per-process limit imposed by Win32, we are looking into porting to a 64-bit OS--maybe Vista, maybe Windows7. As an investigative first step, we have installed our software on a Vista64 box. We discovered that the driver for the 1410 card does not work in this environment; when we call imgGrabSetup(), we get an error "This 32-bit device is operating on a 64-bit OS with more than 3GB of physical memory.  This configuration could allocate 64-bit memory which is unsupported by the device.  To solve this problem, reduce the amount of physical memory in the system."  After poking around on this forum, I can see that this limitation is true for VC++ and .NET apps, but not for LabView.

    My question is this: does anyone know if NI is working to resolve this issue? I see that there are firmware updates for the 1427 and 1429 cards to run under the conditions I described; does this imply (he said hopefully) that NI is working its way through its cards, "fixing" the firmware?

    I am also curious: If we ported our code to 64-bits, are there now or are there plans to develop in the future, 64-bit drivers for the cards I have listed (or equivalents?)

Thanks, Phil Coveney

[mishkin]

Hey Phil,

I don't know if you've come across this article:  Which NI Vision Products Support Windows Vista? but it mentions the specifics of the physical memory limitations you described in your post. It also lists the card models for which firmware upgrades are available to lift the restrictions for non-Labview applications. Both 1427 and 1429 fall into this category. There is not an analogous firmware upgrade for the 1410 nor the 1428. 

As  far as the 64-bit support of our drivers, you can see our Vision drivers' compatability with the 64-bit operating systems (currently only Vista 64) in the same article. You can see that NI-IMAQ is entirely supported on Vista 64, but it does run in 32-bit mode. 

Also, I found a related discussion on physical memory allocations in another forum post, which I hope you find useful.