Hi everybody,

I recently made a trip to the computer store to upgrade my computer. I wanted to buy more RAM memory. Currently I'm running 1 GB of RAM. In the store they told me that windows XP does not allow for more than 2 GB of RAM to be used. The rest would be transferred to the video memory. Is this true? I was planning on going up to 4 or 3 GB of RAM, but now I'm not so sure.

My current processor is a pentium 4 of 3,2 GHz. I would replace that with: Intel Core2 Quad 2,4 GHz.
The problem is that DAZ Studio runs very slow under my current configuration. Every scene with V4.1 in it takes a very long time to load, scenes with more than one V4.1 figure in it or a V4.1 figure and an M3.0 figure sometimes don't load at all. My computer just reboots itself...
Do I solve this nasty problem by upgrading to just 2 GB of RAM or do I need more ? Will the Quadcore processor help in anyway? Also I'm planning on installing a new videocard.
The curent one is a NVIDIA GeForce 5700LE, the new one would be a ASUS EN8600GTS...

If anybody can clear this out for me ( because in the computerstore they couldn't as they didn't know DAZ studio ) I would be very gratefull,

Thanks a lot in advance,

Peevee

I doubt your problems are due to the processor, and although memory might be a factor it isn't the only one - rebooting is sually a video issue, so the first thing to check is that you have the latest drivers.

Under XP Home no application can address more than 2GB of RAM, though the system can address up to 4GB and use the excess for itself or for other applications. Some applications can, under XP Pro, address up to 3GB of RAm but D|S isn't one of them. Although XP can go up to 4GB, the upper part of the space is already used by components such as the video card and you are not likely to get more than 3GB of usable RAM however much you add - but up to 3 may be useful, 2 isn't the cut-off.

A dual core chip will help when rendering with 3Delight, but not with scene creation as D|S itself is single-threaded (beyond the fact that other things can run on the second core, reducing competition).

I agree..Don't laugh too hard here,, but my old computer doesn't crash or load V4 slow  and anyone who has seen my gallery knows how much I love to use props...and cram stuff into a pic. 
My old pc has 384 mb of ram...it's a 1.2 ghz and my old video card is only 34 mb.
BUT, I run regular maintenance on it and I don't run a lot of trash in the background...just my anti-virus and my firewall and I made sure that those do the job without eating up resources.
I don't let a screen saver run in the background and no desktop themes.
You would be surprised how much speed you can get when you turn off all the trash and keep your pc defragged....

This tute over at DAZ looks good for cutting down rendering times in complicated scenes:

Introduction
A complicated background prop, such as a shelf full of various books, uses a lot of geometry information, as well as texture files. Such a prop adds realism and detail to your renders, but takes up lots of memory, lengthening render time. Using D|S' Export as OBJ and Collect Maps features, you can reduce the impact of complicated props on your system, speeding up your renders. We'll be using a set of full bookshelves in this example, but this also works for dolls, messy desks, garages full of stuff, you name it!

http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/tutorial/tutorial/-/?id=2282

Thanks for the reply everybody! I'm disk-cleaning as I wrtite this message, and the defragmenting is next. However, one thing I didn't mention in the previous post ( stupid, but I didn't realize it at the time ) : most of the stuff I use in DAZ Studio is in fact poser-stuff. I have a library-directory in DAZ Studio that takes me to my poser-libraries. Can this be a problem of slow and sloppy DAZ Studio work aswell?

I did clean up my computer by turning of every program that auto-starts with windows but my virus scanner. In this way I have been able to free up some 10 MB of RAM... Not very spectacular but since I'm disk-cleaning right now, I haven't checked the inpact on the DAZ performance yet.

I'll let you know how it turns out,

Cherio,

Peevee

I have Poser installed but I never use it..I always use DS and my studio directory points to the poser program so everything poser is installed into poser with daz finding it there..and everything daz is installed into daz.. don't  know if that makes a difference or not..I know you can do it in different ways.

When i first started out with 3d graphics i had no more than 512mb ram, AMD athlon 350xp cpu, 64mb graphic card, win 98SE and things ran well.

I was also inform while doing any rendering no matter what program you used you are best off turning any programs that run in the background off, this will help with giving a bit more speed cutting render times down.

Anyway on to this computer, its sn AMD Athlon 3000+ chip, 2gig ram, 256mb/256bit graphic card and win xp home. I find that renders are fine on it but if i have my AV, Firewall, Antispyware and couple of other programs running in the background the renders slow down...this is noticable mostly with Bruce(yes i use it)

Another big upgrade due soon with the computer...4gig ram, 1gig graphics card, amd 5200+ chip and new motherboard.

I'm still using my 700Mhz AMD, with 756MBs of RAM.

RAM is the bottlecap that forms when you measure how big your scene is(with all it's stuff added,) plus how big an image you want to render.  A Lack of RAM is why a render will fail.  The CPU, once your RAM requirement has been satisfied, dictates how fast the render will complete.

One big thing to watch out for, when building a scene, are morphs  Before a big render, or when creating a scene with lots of people; you only need one morph per Figure Part.  If you look at th image, in my gallery, that my avatar was made from you will see V3 scene that used to be 250MBs; without any props, just V3.  By just removing unused morphs(those set at "0") I trimmed that scene down to about 65MBs.  Then when I consolidated all of her morphs, to one per part, I came out with like a 6MBs Poser scene. I'm not sure how to do this in D|S, but Poser has a bunch of free Python Scripts to help i.e. SVDL's RemoveMorphs.py, and SpawnFigure.  BTW(SPawning is where consolidation happens.  Poser has a function to Spawn, it's just a little labor intensive(for a whole figure)  Ockhams zeromorphs.py, is also a big help.  Ohh...Morph Manager is another free utility to get through this, which I think we can use here with D|S?

RHaseltine was correct WIndows can access 2GBs of RAM, per application; and it-self is counted as an application.  I'm not so sure about his 4GB perspectus though.  I've heard of an XP Pro 4GB limit, but this was in reference to how much virtual memory is allowed per disk.  I do'nt know of too many motherboards that will even hold more than 4GBs of RAM, but as far as I've known there was'nt a limit to the number of applications you could open, at 2GBs a pop?  And as far as I know a Vidoe Card would need to have Virtual Textures, in order to occupy Physical Memory.

All 32 bit operating systems are limited to 4GB of RAM, and at least for standard "PC" type boxes the address space for peripherals like video cards uses the top of that 4GB, meaning that any RAM there will be inaccessible.