Out of Memory... Some of us have had it and still get it even after SR1 - yet others have never had this problem even on complicated scenes. Lately I have been putting MojoWorld through it's paces and guess what? I get errors trying to render complicated scenes, the thing is I have manged bigger scenes than these in both Bryce & Vue. What I am now wondering is the memory issue in rendering somehow linked to the render engine as both Mojo and Poser are based on the Reyes Engine. Is it that some systems don't like the engine? Any other speculations on this?

Memory leaks are notoriously difficult to eradicate.
Stiching together bits of software from several different sources doesn't make things any easier.

Poser is incredibly inefficient in memory usage at render time. I just tried to render a V3 with hair (no clothes for a test render) at the max default setting and Poser refused (on a 4GB system). In Lightwave or Vue I can render her with larger textures than Poser will take with the mesh subpatched up to around half a million polygons with no problem. Firefly is useless for large renders at high settings. About the only thing you can do is reboot your system and then start out at very low quality and texture size settings and slowly increase them until firefly chokes. I gave up on it for anything but quick test renders.

Yes and yes. Not as much memory leaks as memory fragmentation. Leaks are mainly caused by dangling pointers and such - memory that is forgotten and never freed. Fragmentation will occur even if you free memory and requires the skill of a neuro-surgeon to avoid. For example, you allocate a small memory block then a large one. You then free the small memory block. Do this often enough and you have all of these little holes that add up to lots of memory available, but not enough contiguous memory for allocations! Again, when stitching softwares and various libs/dlls together, the potential for fragmentation is great. This is my reason not to render in Poser for anything but tests. interPoser Pro is currently being practically rewritten to reduce memory fragmentation as much as humanly possible so that the same doesn't occur in Cinema 4D (though, not during renders but during loads).

In my experience, Poser will only go just so far in rendering tasks -- and no further: regardless of your system's specs.

Don't get me wrong -- Poser works for about 80% of the scenes that I do. But that remaining 20% can be a real pain.

If P6 chokes on a render, it chokes. There are various tricks that you can try to make Poser do its job on rendering. Sometimes those tricks work, and sometimes they don't.

Some work-arounds that I've found:

1. Only do smaller, less complicated renders in Poser.
2. Delete items from your scene until it works.
3. Pick a different render application. Import your Poser scenes into that. My choice is Vue Infinite. There are others.

None of these are ideal solutions, IMO. But you do what you must in order to achieve the results that you want.

Most of the time, I can use P6 natively. But often not for complicated scenes. However, I will say that the problem was helped considerably by SR1.

Well, REYES (Render Everything You Ever Saw) is an algorithm, not a specific implementation. The 3DeLight render in Daz Studio is REYES based as is Pixar's Renderman and numerous others. A good REYES renderer can handle large scenes.

This is really pissing me off. Why can't Poser handle a 4K texture? What values for rendering you folks use?

You can get utilities which will defragment RAM, and when I was using P5 in a half-gig of RAM that could free up quite a big chunk of available RAM. There's something about Poser which doesn't work well with virtual memory. With a full gigabyte, I've been able to render quite large images with reasonable speed, images comparable to what my film scanner will produce. P6 seems to handle some of the process a little faster, but has introduced a few new weirdnesses. So, right now, I'm wondering if P6 was worth getting. But I'm just at the awkward point: it has a lot of little changes that will trip up a P5 user, and I'm trying to get used to them. But I don't think the rendering engine is improved at a fundamental level. There are extra shader nodes, but...