There are a few misconceptions here. Rather than quote each one I'll just tell you the story my way.

First of all, trying to get Poser to use ALL of your memory is not the same as trying to get Poser to use ALL of your CPU. These are different, because there is no limit to how fast Poser can run, so more CPU is always better. But there is a limit to how big Poser needs to be for any given scene. It's like trying to argue with a cup of water, telling it to be a gallon, just because you put it in a gallon bottle.

If Poser doesn't have enough objects it is working on to fill up memory, then offering it more memory does nothing at all. You could have a terabyte available in a 64-bit computer running Poser Pro 64-bit, but with the scene you were rendering above, it would still only use 1.7 GB.

I hope that is clear.

Now a 32-bit address bus can reach 4 GB of memory, not the 2 GB claimed above. 2 to the 32nd power is 4 billion something. So the most memory that such a computer can manage is 4 GB.

Because of how the address space is organized in Windows, no single application can normally have an address space bigger than 2GB, unless you do something explicitly to re-arrange it to be 3 GB. The last GB of address space (not memory, but process address space) is reserved by the OS. Don't confuse the two.

Despite this limitation, 4 GB on a Vista 32 machine is decidedly NOT a scam. No single program would normally get 2 GB, but you can run more than one at once! If you have 3 such programs, you need 6 GB of RAM, even if none of these programs itself is a 64-bit app. It is true that that Poser does not take advantage of such an arrangement, as it only runs one copy of itself, and although it can multithread, these threads are in the same process, so they have to share the 2 GB limit. However, if you render in a separate process, then the Poser GUI, Pose Room, Material Room, etc. can have 2 GB and the FFRender process can also have 2 GB, which means that Poser 7 and 8 can use 4 GB of RAM, altogether. Without 4 GB, you could not render a 2 GB scene and keep working on other things, without doing a crapload of swapping.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)