What are the Virtual Memory settings usually recomended? Size? Should I alocate a discreete partition on my hard disk for it? Any recomendations welcome. Thanks

Satfi, what operating system are you using? (The answer to your question depends on the operating system.)

Windows 2000

Generally you should set your virtually memory to the same size as the amount of physical RAM but its best to set it for automatic.

Yes, for Win2000, this is correct - "automatic."

Is this better? To have 3 hard drives. One for my OS only, one for the installation of my programs, and another for my virtual memory. That way, if my cpu needs to, it can acces all three points simultaneously, much better performance overall.

Generally with 2 hard drives, you store the OS and applications on one and the data on the second. This is most prevelent with video dumping and editing, so the OS and apps dont interfer and make you drop frames. As for your virtual... probably best also kept with OS and apps or stick on your 3rd HDD. Another thing to keep in mind is to not share the drives with the same IDE port and keep your CD with your OS HDD. The cheap cost of RAM has allowed me to go to 2 gigs on my render/design box. I rarely go over 1 gig and that includes running Vue, Poser, Photoshop and a dozen small apps all the time (I never shut down).

For best performance, you should have between 1x and 2x as much VM as you have physical memory, as a general rule... at least for single-user setups. The automatic setting is also dynamic; that is not good for performance because it tends to fragment the drive and along with it, the VM file. You're generally better off using a fixed size VM file, by configuring it on a freshly defragmented hard disk or partition. That way it will remain contiguous, so you do not incur the extra overhead caused by having the paging file fragmented.

Tiny, in plain language, after the CPU processes the instructions to "render" a line of the picture, the results of that process have to be stored (first in a small buffer file in RAM) and then out onto the hard drive. Line by line. So, the hard drive can be a bottleneck. Poser and Vue use two entirely different methods for "rendering" a picture, (calculating the light path coming from each light source, calculating the impact of the light on each object, calculating the shadows, calculating the light bounced from one object to the next object, calculating the effect of light on the sky and the ground planes, etc. Vue has a much greater number of lights, objects, shadows, etc. to handle than Poser, and much greater number of geometric light calculations to make. So, a person would expect there to be significant differences between the two programs. The difference should lie in the direction that Poser would experience a proportionally greater increase in render speed because it has less to deal with. Am still researching out the performance of these SATA drives, but I'm with Thalaxis. I'd mess with the Virtual Memory (VM) settings to try to increase your "buffer" or "cache" space first. Still pursuing this, Tiny....... we haven't forgotten you.

Generally, the only time that the hard drive will become a bottleneck during rendering is when there is not enough physical memory available to store the scene graph in it. If the hard drive is churning away during the rendering process, you probably need either more memory, or more optimization in your scene.

Thanks, Thalaxis. You always contribute a lot. Nice to have you around.

No problem, I'm glad to be able to help!

Is that usually during the modeling process or the render process though?

Both, actually... both tend to be fairly memory hungry if the polygon count is high, but in both cases, the critical thing is physical memory. If your machine doesn't have enough physical memory, you could easily make even a dual 1.5 GHz Itanium2 perform like a handheld. Performance-wise, the main difference between the modeling and rendering processes is that the modeling process requires sending a lot of data to the graphics card, while the rendering process, at least when using a raytracer, is generally limited by computing power first. In either case however, virtual memory access is slow enough to be the dominant factor if there isn't enough physical memory to cache the entire scene.

I was modeling a very large (poligon count)file and Vue crashed a few times. What could be the problem? I have 1.5G RAM and AMD 2.7G computer. Could it be the graphics card? Thanks

Is it overclocked, or do you mean an AthlonXP 2700+? It could well be the graphics card; I've had similar issues with Vue myself. In all honesty though, I tried the same crash-prone scene on my Athlon and on my Centrino, and both ended up crashing on me... but only during rendering. The modelling part worked fine, just excruciatingly slowly due to the polygon count. Hm... maybe I should bug E-on and ask for low-overhead foliage proxies as a future enhancement, sort of MetaMation style from the old LightWave 5.x days. What graphics card do you have? Are the drivers up to date?

I have a AMD Athlon XP 2.7 with PNY NVidia Quadro FX Card. Maybe I need to adjust any settings on it? Thanks

My first suggestion would be to check nVidia's site, and ensure that you have the latest WHQL-certified driver kit installed. Once you have done that, if the crashing persists, the only way we can help you here is if you give us as much info about your system as you can; then the techie types here (including me) can better aid you in troubleshooting the issue... or come up with a bug report for E-on.