Quote - Ok one more thing if you dont mind....
I was under the impression that more memory would solve my rendering problems.   I had 512 and removed half of that and replaced with a 1gb stick of mem which gave me 1.256 of ram and am planing to add another GB this weekend.
My question is this;  simply put is ram the problem or not? 

 

It can help, sure.  However, no matter how much memory you stick on the machine (e.g. I have 8GB) all versions of Poser currently available are limited to 2 or 3 GB of memory under any circumstances, because they are written for 32-bit operating systems.  Even if you run them under a 64-bit operating systems, they still have this 2 or 3GB limit (Poser 6 and 7 are 3GB, previous versions are 2GB).  In fact just now I had a render crash because it overflowed 3GB of claimed RAM and crapped out (and incidentally I got around it by minimizing while running a second time).  This 3GB limit is fundamental to pretty much all 32-bit applications, and can't really be gotten around.  There are other things that can help, as jfbeute pointed out you can adjust bucket size down, or you can render a complex scene in smaller chunks and composite them together.

This is the advantage to using a 64-bit operating system and running an application that is written in 64-bit instructions, that "technically" you are not limited to 3GB any more, and upcoming "Poser 7 Pro" is advertised as coming with a renderer that runs in 64-bit mode, as long as you have a 64-bit operating system; probably that will be a great help, but I guess it comes down to how much money you want to pay for just that feature, because imo little else of great value is going to be included.

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