quite a while ago, there was some discussion about if it’s worth to keep supporting 32bit builds for 2.8. Alongside that, there was a discussion about how the way build versions are presented on Blender site may affect download stats for different architecture versions.
Past few months, it was corrected. The main download button now automatically offers 64bit Windows version, and on builder page, 64bit versions are on top.
Would it be possible to release new download stats for the past few months? I’d like to see how the better presentation of Blender builds on the site affected 32bit vs 64bit download ratio. I would not be surprised if 32bit downloads were completely negligible at this point.
Yes, the download stats for 32bit were relatively low even when Blender.org site gave all users, including inexperienced ones, choice of build with 32bit being on top. So that’s why I am curious how much more has that changed since 64bit builds are now the default suggested ones, with 32bit ones requiring additional step to get to.
That 32bit Win10 build was released for some super efficient, low-power Intel Atom based tablets with Atom chips last of which were released about 6 years ago. But such Atom processors would never be able to run Blender 2.8, especially due to their GPUs. Let alone the fact most of them had only 2GB of RAM, 1.5 of which was constantly occupied by Windows even if you didn’t have any other program open.
It’s irrelevant mostly, I have brought up dropping 32 bit support many times in the past due to the maintenance of the windows libs being a gigantic time vampire, however it was decided that we’d keep the 32 bit version for at-least the early 2.8 releases so i did the work, sank in the time and build and tested the libs. the work is done, so we may as well ship a 32 bit version. I’ll have another go at getting 32 bit dropped when the next large lib-update comes along.
It’s not just about dropping 32bit support. For me, it’s mostly curiosity. I am really curious about how much different presentation on the Blender.org download page impacted the amount of 32bit downloads.
It would be interesting to compare the 2.79b downloads page that has the new presentation to the downloads from the 2.80/2.79 daily build page which still presents 32 and 64 equally. If the daily build page is serving more 32-bit downloads than the 2.79b page, then that would almost certainly have to be due to user uncertainty/confusion/error.