Hi All OK, I've installed SR1 but I'm STILL getting 'out of memory' messages on occasion in Poser 6. Now were not talking 'BIG' renders here, just one figure most times. It seems that whenever this problem is talked about somebody point's out that Windows XP can't properly handle more than 2 Ghz of RAM. I am confused! I recently saw a PC running Windows XP Pro working PERFECTLY well with 16 Ghz of RAM. Please explain where the 2 Gig rule comes into play and HOW! Also, what's the way round it? I have a brand new system, Pentium 4 3.4, XP Pro, Asus main board, 2 Gig DDR2 Ram, x2 80 Gig SATA HDs, FX 6800 graphic card.

windows can only allocate 2GB per program. eg you have 4 GB ram and 2 programs each will get 2GB max. as to ways round it? get Windows Server (3GB max per program) or Windows 64.. that should allow 4gb per program at least...

Well, Xp does handle more than 2GB of RAM. Never heard of this problem before? Some motherboards don't support more than 2 GB of RAM, So check your boards specs. But if it boots allright it works allright(in most cases). I had a strange problem with Poser that on rendering large images, I sometimes got the eroor ...Dumping Physical Memory...and then alovely bluescreen and then reboot. The problem was with one RAM chip of mine. Had some defctive rows. If your sys shows something similar, check your RAM. Also Poser uses a lot of Virtual Mem. So make sure that you have windows manage your page file size automatically. That way whenever poser needs more mem windows grants it more(And also alerts you that its doing so). Hope that helps :)

I've been following a number of these threads now (on SR! & out of mem and such) and really starts to sound to me like a conflict of running software (perhaps). Getting an out of mem message with one figure only and not even a big render sounds very odd. Why? I've installed SR1 and I'm able to push P6 a lot further then before. I'm able to render scenes now that I couldn't render before. I'm not the only one. 2Gb of memory is more then enough to render one figure (with high res textures) and even render it quite large.

Windows use 32 bit pointers (DWORD) for accessing memory what gives a maximun of 4GB. The only way for accessing more memory is to use 64 bit pointers (QWORD) and of course Windows 64 with Poser 64.

Usually the problem is with thw swap file allocation size and physical memory. remember you have physical memory + swap file. I have a laptop with 2g ram and was having a bit of problems with Poser 6, I changed my swap file from 3x physical memory which was a swap file of 6gig down to a swap file of 2gig and problems started going away. I turned off the swap file and only used physical memory and poser 6 was doing fine, but windows OS was acting wierd so I went back to a 2gig swap and things seem fine on my poser6 now. something to play around with. remember all the textures become uncompressed in memory and in large scenes and high render sizes memory goes quickly. check your bucket settings and read the manual about memory useage if you have not already, it gives some simple examples. win xp pro uses around 256 meg just it's self (it's high, cant remember exact memory useage), throw in 2 V3 models with high textures a high res temple and render at 6000x4000 and you will be eating memory up like it was candy.

I have 1GB RAm, Celeron 2.4, 1.3 GB Swap and I render to 3000X3000 without any probs whatsoever, 2 -3 figures too. Has to be the swap file problem!

how do i change the swap file? as I have memory problems on p6 too...but im only on 768mb ram (hopefully to change soon)

Forget the number of figures. The number of figures is almost irrelevant. I tried it with Python scripts, you can render 100 low-res P4 figures or 16 V3 figures on an average XP or OS X computers, without running out of memory (the amount of physical RAM doesn't mean much in that regard anyway - ever since we have virtual RAM, an application doesn't even know how much physical RAM there is, the OS will always give it a 4GB address space to play in and handle the swapping). What you should be more concerned about is the number of textures, their size and your render settings. To quote the Poser 6 tutorial manual: "For example, a single 4000x4000pixel texture, without texture filtering, uses 64Mb of RAM (which is itself a good argument for reducing maximum texture size- see below) while with texture filtering on, that same texture takes 192Mb- more than twice the RAM for the same texture file. " Now, imagine one figure with color and bump textures for body and face plus a hair texture (five textures) - at that rate, the textures alone take 960MB RAM. Then you need some additional space for shadow maps, geometry, morphs, various internal structures the renderer is keeping and of course Poser itself, and it's easy to see where the 2GB program heap go to.

Guess I'm getting old, what is windows 64? Thanks, Marque

Thank's for some very informative reply's everyone. Stewer, as usual your explanation is comprehensive and thought provoking! what I want to know then is why did i NEVER get this problem doing the same things on a smaller system in Poser 5???

Marque - Windows 64 is MS new Windows OS for new CPUs coming out soon

Ahhhhhhhh so! Thanks! Runs around gathering pennies...lol Marque

Not sure if this has anything at all to do with it....but...my pp is running on an older version of xp and whenever I get that message what I end up having to do is delete all the temp orary internet files, files held in my norton protected; my history and then it works again.

Marque, Windows 64 will not work with most current hardware. But it is already available in a limited release for those who have recently purchased a compatible 64-bit system and have and are willing to trade in an XP Pro OEM license. Unfortunately, lots of hardware drivers are not yet available, and from what I've read at microsoft.com, plenty of folks are still having troubles with it. In other words, unless you particularly like headaches, you might want to save and invest those pennies for a good little while yet before making the leap.

Trust me, by the time I can kick out for it it will probably be stable...lol Just bought an Olympus C8080, so a little broke. Marque

After installing SR1, I have found no serious performance problems regarding render time. In fact, the size of the new files produced by P6 are about a fourth or fifth the size of it's counterpart P5 PZ3. I am now happily adding fully loaded Vickies rather than the stripped down versions I found necessary in P5. I am linking to the P5 library due to it's size ... 104 GB with 10,000 geometry files and 72,000 texture files. P5 used to take 15 minutes to boot up.

[wondering out loud]
I wonder if you would get 'out of memory' errors caused by a video card or it's drivers? I know a lot of the Poser crashes are caused by that, could it also cause memory error messages?
[/wondering out loud]

Message edited on: 06/07/2005 20:10